Under a Dark Summer Sky (4 page)

Doc remembered how the soldiers had been welcomed by the French locals—all ranks, all colors, it didn't matter. “It must have been hard, coming back here, coming back…to this.” His eyes took in the separate door for colored patients to use. Just like everything else in town, from the separate serving hatch at Mitchell's store to the separate diner on the highway. Doc had even seen a driving map of the South that showed which restrooms colored people were allowed to use.

“You could say that,” Henry said softly, his eyes on the brown liquid in his glass. “I just… We thought, you know, when we came back, that things would change. That they'd be different. And instead…”

“It was worse than before,” Doc said. He thought back to those heady days when they had first come back, so flushed with victory and pride and faith in the future. That initial euphoria had curdled so quickly, once it became clear the men had brought newfangled ideas home with them. The rest of America, it seemed, shared none of the veterans' sense of a new era. They liked the old era, the old order, just fine, thank you very much. Doc recalled the headlines. It was almost like some kind of mass insanity had taken hold. There were riots in the cities, lynchings in the country, as far south as Fort Lauderdale. Even down in sleepy little Heron Key, they felt the cold wind of change. And then came the stock market crash of '29, which only made people cling tighter to the comfort of old, familiar things. “I understand why you feel like that,” he began and tried to imagine what it must have been like for someone like Henry, an officer who by rights should have been on course for prosperity. “Why you want to go back to France, to the way of life there. But we need people like you, if things are ever going to change here.”

Henry's gaze had flickered into life. “And end up with a noose around my neck? Or worse? I heard about a guy upstate, accused of raping a white girl, forced to eat his own dick before they shot him full of holes. Little kids cut off parts of him, Doc.” He had slammed his glass onto the table. The liquid sloshed onto the Formica. “For keepsakes, Doc. Keepsakes,” he said more quietly. “And what are people like you doing about it?”

Still
some
anger
left
in
him
after
all.
It had given Doc hope. You had to care about something to be angry. Far better that than the flat hopelessness that bent Henry's shoulders into the posture of defeat. And Henry was right, he conceded. Where did Doc get off, talking about change, when he had lost any stomach for a fight? It lay buried somewhere in the French mud.

He checked his bag one final time.
Maybe
it
will
be
all
right
tonight. Maybe people will just get along.
With a last look around, he hefted the bag and went out into the late afternoon sunshine.
And
maybe
that
hog
will
fly
out
of
its
hole
in
the
ground.

• • •

Dwayne walked quickly for several hundred yards before he felt the tension begin to seep out of his pores with the sweat. He had been unfair to Doc, who only ever meant well, but the man's interference, his habit of looking over the top of his glasses like a schoolteacher, had gotten on Dwayne's last nerve. He slowed and went to rest in the shade of a palm at his favorite picnic table on the beach.

Ever since that little brown baby had come out of his wife, he had felt like he was living in a fever dream. He was well acquainted with them, having suffered with the Spanish flu in 1918. He had almost died during a week in which he lost all sense of reality and time and had been left with permanently impaired hearing. No one knew the extent of it, not even Noreen, thanks to his lip-reading skills.

A hermit crab crawled up to his boot. Dwayne picked it up gently in his palm and marveled at the delicate engineering of the claws, the phenomenal strength needed to haul that shell around everywhere. At that moment, his own responsibilities felt just as heavy. The whole town depended on him to make the evening run smooth and safe. He had taken every precaution possible, installed every backup available, yet he could not shake the sensation of shadows brushing against him, even in the bright, slanting sunlight.

The crab pinched the flesh of his palm, not hard, more like an experiment.
Roy
would
like
this
, he thought. At only a few months old, he already took a keen interest in the world—the pelicans, the herons fishing in the mangroves, the peacocks. Even the march of ants across the wooden floor would transfix him. The little lizards that sped along the porch, miniature dinosaurs with bright eyes, were a source of special delight. Roy clapped and giggled each time he saw one, which was about forty times a day.

How was it possible, he wondered, to love the child while hating its mother? How had he become this person? He, who had always used his strength to help the weak and vulnerable? It was Noreen's fault. Each time his hand went out to strike her, he felt physically sick yet compelled, as if some invisible force took control of his limbs, made him shout unforgivable things at her. She still refused to name the father—in fact, refused to say anything at all—which only enraged him further.

Dwayne had insisted that Noreen stay home tonight. After all, Roy didn't belong on either side of the beach. He couldn't be with the whites, and the coloreds wouldn't want him either. He feared this would be the case for the boy's entire life. And Dwayne could do without the curious looks and well-meaning comments while he tried to do his job. The anger toward Noreen, always smoldering, reignited inside him.

But even so, he could remember that things had not always been like this. Noreen, when they first met, had called him her “gentle giant.” The first few years were good. No babies, but not for lack of trying. Then he began to notice she seemed distracted. She no longer waited up for him to finish his shift. She no longer listened avidly to all the details of his day. Instead, she cleaned and tidied around him while he talked, her mind clearly elsewhere, and this while he struggled to cope with the extra workload caused by the veterans' arrival twelve months previously. He was working harder than he ever had in his life, all thanks to them, and when he came home, he just wanted some appreciation. But when he reached for her in the night, she pretended to be asleep, so it felt like he had to force himself on her. The pregnancy was such a welcome surprise that he buried his doubts in happy plans for the baby, while she became more pale and withdrawn as time went on.

The whole town was laughing at him now, he knew that. He felt it each time he attended a disturbance or took someone down to the county jail. He knew what they were thinking: How was he supposed to keep the criminals of the district in check when he couldn't even control his own wife? It was the lack of respect he minded the most, as if his badge meant nothing just because his wife was a whore. She had ruined him, and Roy was a daily reminder of that—would be for the rest of his life. The flame of anger burned higher. He felt it rise up through his feet, as if it came from the very earth, through his legs, his groin, his torso, to his neck and finally to his head where it burned coldly. Dwayne set the crab onto the sand and raised his boot to crush it. He felt the approach of trouble, like the whiff of the camp latrines that sometimes carried all the way down the beach. Everyone would look to him when it came.

He lowered his foot harmlessly. On dainty claws, the crab tiptoed away across the sand.

Selma sluiced seawater over the bloody tools, then scraped them clean with handfuls of sand until they shone. The gator steaks were laid out on her kitchen counter, ready for the grill, covered by a fishing net to keep off the flies. The iron smell of raw meat filled the small space.

Her back ached from the butchery, and her shoulder throbbed from the rifle's recoil. Blisters shone on her hands, in just about the only places not already calloused. She tore a chunk from the aloe plant beside the kitchen door and rubbed its soothing juice over her skin.

Her husband, Jerome, had gone fishing with some of his boys, said he would meet her at the beach. He had struggled for years to find an occupation worthy of his talents: bartender, pineapple farmer, bus driver. He had a turtle kraal for a while, but Selma had to do all the killing for him because he couldn't stand how they screamed. After she witnessed the way he hacked away at the poor creatures' throats, she could well understand why they did. But meat was life, any meat that didn't already have maggots in it. Her mother, Grace, had taught her that, during the hungry years.

None of Jerome's schemes had lasted for more than a few weeks. He had even tried selling encyclopedias door-to-door for a while. This was one of the strangest things ever to happen in Heron Key, as most of his customers couldn't read, and neither could he. The only good thing to come out of it was when he gave his entire sample set of the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
to Missy when he quit. He was all for putting it on the fire, figured it would burn real well, but Selma had persuaded him otherwise.

Now, it seemed, he was a fisherman.
Good
thing
that
fish
don't scream.

She stripped off her blood-spattered apron and dunked it in a bucket of seawater to soak. Leaning against the sink, she kneaded the sore muscles in her neck and wished Jerome had stayed to help. They had been married fifteen years, and every day of it had been a battle of one kind or another—to get Jerome's lazy ass to work, to raise enough food from their tiny plot…to swallow the sad knowledge that it would only be the two of them, forever. That last was like the taste of bile in her throat.

And yet, at the beginning, she recalled, it hadn't been so bad. He could make her laugh, one of the few people with that ability, and she had figured the babies would come fast. When they did not, and he began to drift from one job to another like a leaf on the tide, she realized he would never change and made her peace with that. She didn't complain. She didn't run away. (Where to?) She just put one foot in front of the other and kept moving forward.

The sun had reached the low point of the day when it shone straight into her kitchen window, marked with spatters of grease and dead flies. She scrubbed at the glass. The sounds of bickering chickens drifted in on the breeze that lifted the palm fronds. She and Jerome had built the house together, expanded it out from Grace's little shack over the years into a modest home. The sitting porch was the best in the neighborhood, her chickens the tastiest around. The secret was plenty of oyster shells for their gizzards to work on and lots of wild herbs in their feed. The hens in the yard were, as always, competing for rooster Elmer's attention. He preened his russet feathers in the slanting sun, oblivious. Baskets of tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers waited in the shade of a palmetto. The walls of the shed were lined with gleaming rows of jars, relishes, jams, and preserves, all neatly labeled.

Missy often teased her, as Selma's idea of a shortage was having only one strawberry shortcake in the house instead of two. But after a childhood so poor that she was sometimes forced to exist on fish bones and grass, Selma treated hunger like an enemy, always waiting to strike. She remained vigilant at all times. Her weapons were grits and corn pone, her defenses made of swamp cabbage and fried fish. Their little house was a fortress of food.

She stepped over the bucket where her apron soaked to reach the shelf in the corner. In a neat row were laid a rattlesnake's skull, two dried raccoon paws, a crunchy brown bunch of shallots, and a crab's shell. A muslin bag held a lock of Missy's hair and a shred of Henry's shirt.

It had not taken long for the magic to work, just a few weeks. The hardest part was bringing Henry back to Heron Key in the first place. Now
that
had been hard. She had tried every spell handed down to her by Grace, who had brought the knowledge with her from Haiti. Selma had written it all out in her unschooled hand before Grace died, in the bulging, tattered book beneath the shelf.

Selma stroked the book's rough cover, made from an old burlap feed bag. Those last weeks with her mother had been a whirl of activity. Grace had chosen her own time, sure as if she had walked into the sea to drown. It had happened when Henry had been gone for fifteen years. Selma had felt Grace's haste, her need to finish things off; her mother was preparing for her most important trip, but she would not need the battered old wicker suitcase for it.

“Selma,” Grace would say, “I got somethin' to learn you.”

And Selma would scoop up the ragged collection of pages in their shabby binding and begin to write. They would sit for hours together in the dappled shade of the pines around Grace's tiny shack. The fallen needles made a soft and fragrant blanket on the sand. Dragonflies settled on them, so still were they. Eyes closed, her back propped against the tree trunk, Grace would recite the spells without stumbling or hesitation. The words poured from her mouth faster than Selma's pencil could write. It was, Selma realized as her hand traced the book's contours, her fondest memory of Grace. There were far more of the other kind of memories.

That Grace had the power was beyond question. People in the neighborhood came to her for help with all manner of woes in their lives: to bring or banish love, to heal a sick child, to make a good harvest, to bring misfortune on their enemies. The definitive demonstration of Grace's power had come one Thanksgiving when Selma was thirteen. Dinner was just a scrawny chicken and some stunted sweet potatoes. The air was thick with the smell of other people's turkey and gravy and stuffing. Selma went for a walk in the Key lime grove to distract her hungry stomach and came across Shonuff Thompson, named on account of his stock answer for pretty much everything. He was smoking by himself, on the ground under the thorny branches, skinny ankles crossed. With a nearly toothless smile and the promise of a piece of chocolate, he had beckoned her down beside him. Her mind had shut the memory away but her body remembered—the rough stubble on his chin, the way he had forced her legs apart with a thrust of his knee, his sour, smoky breath hot on her neck, the coral hard under her back.

When she had stumbled home, Grace demanded an explanation for her torn and dirty dress. Selma had whispered the tale through bruised lips, shamed by the blood on her legs. Grace had said nothing for a long time, so long that Selma had thought she had been forgotten. And then Grace had looked at her, a dark flame in her eyes, and said, “Wait, child, and see the Lord at work.” A few weeks later, Shonuff was killed by a lightning strike while asleep in the grove under a tree that took a direct hit. To Grace, it was all the same Lord, much to the despair of the local pastor. She prayed equally hard to the old spirits and to Jesus, confident that one or the other would come through.

But they did not. Years passed. The war ended. Still Henry did not come back. At first, there were a few postcards, from California, from New Mexico, from Oregon. Then they stopped. Neither prayers nor spells could bring him back. And when Selma had transcribed the last one in the book, Grace had taken to her bed and turned her face to the wall. Nothing could coax her to eat or drink. She just stopped, like a car out of gas. Doc Williams could find nothing wrong with her. He offered to take her to Miami to see a specialist, but Selma had declined. She knew why Grace had sickened, and no specialist would be of any help: she had lost her faith, in the old ways and in Jesus. Selma knew Henry was still alive, could feel it, and knew Grace felt it too. On the day when Grace closed her eyes for the last time, a hard, bitter seed took root in Selma's heart. If he would not come back of his own will, she decided, then she would damn well bring him back, using the only method available. Grace had willed her the means; it was time to find out if she had the power. And so she began to work her way through the spells, more in desperation than in hope.

Opening the book, she could still remember the feeling of excitement tinged with dread the first time she had summoned a spirit to bring Henry home—and the crushing disappointment that followed. But she had persevered, through almost the whole book, each time with the same conviction. And each time with the same result. She had saved the most powerful spell for last, the one that summoned the fearsome Agaou. After nearly eighteen years, her hope of seeing Henry again had dimmed to a tiny glow in the farthest, darkest corner of her mind. In desperation, she had gone to the beach at midnight and drawn the
veve
in the sand with cornmeal and ash. She had shaken her snake-bone rattle, scattered a little grilled meat, and spilled her blood on the sand, to send the call of blood to Henry, wherever he was.

And now he was back but, as was often the case with spells, not completely back. It had shocked her at first—he looked so different from the bright, smooth-cheeked young man who had set off all those years ago. Now he looked like an old man, a desperate old man. But she reckoned there wasn't anything wrong with him that couldn't be fixed with enough good food and rest. Of course, it should be her food, and a bed in her house. The camp rations were not fit for a dog, especially when the men worked hard all day under the punishing sun. Yet he would not leave the veterans' camp, behaved like it was his home, rather than staying with his people, where he belonged. And when he confessed that he had spent months in the camp before she knew he was there at all… Well, the pain of it, and the shame, burned her up inside, but she figured he had his reasons, reasons she could not begin to understand. Someday she would hear them. Or not. It was Agaou's price. The spirits never granted anything without a price.

She wrung out the brine from her apron and went to get some fresh water from the cistern to rinse it. But first she climbed the steps to look inside. Two bright eyes blinked up at her through the gloom. A soggy raccoon stood on the little platform she had built for this purpose, after one fell in and drowned, ruining gallons of precious water. She lowered a stick and the animal scampered nimbly up it and dropped to the ground with a wet shake.

She rinsed the apron and hung it on the line to dry. Henry and Missy belonged together, anyone could see that…except possibly the two of them.
No
matter, soon fix that.

The raccoon eyed her from the shade of a scrub pine, wiped his face with his clever paws. He would certainly be back in the cistern in a few days.
Just
like
with
men
, she thought: once an animal found something it liked, it kept coming back, even at the risk of death. With a tired sigh, she went inside to change for the barbecue.

• • •

Hilda Kincaid strained to fasten the buttons of her thin cotton dress, elbows out in a futile attempt to reduce the sweat marks. She was certain that Missy had shrunk the garment, just as she had the other pretty dresses that no longer fit. The shameful trip to Nettie's shop that afternoon had almost undone her. Surely, she thought, there must be some mistake. Those measurements must belong to someone else. She pushed a damp curl from her forehead and yanked on the material where it spanned her hips, creating unflattering horizontal folds. It was the only thing she owned suitable for the Fourth of July barbecue.

Honestly, she'd rather just stay home in a shapeless shift and sit on the porch until the mosquitoes became unbearable. Just rock and watch night fall on the sea and wait for Nelson to come home from the country club, as she did most evenings. He seldom chose to be seen in public with her anymore, which she could well understand, but the whole town would be out tonight. She forced her dimpled feet into a pair of delicate gold sandals.
Maybe
we
can
come
home
early.

When she had returned that afternoon, she had been surprised to find Selma in charge. There had been a strange, mysterious vibration in the air, but Selma had explained, with her strong, level gaze, that Missy had spilled juice on her uniform and gone home to clean up. It was entirely plausible, and yet… But Hilda knew better than to probe. Selma's eyes invited no discussion. Hilda never felt entirely comfortable in her presence; she moved so quietly for a big girl. Missy had brought her in to help one night with a big dinner party, back when the Kincaids still entertained, and ever since, Selma would just appear at odd times.

Missy's Mama had put Nathan down for the night. There was no reason to tarry, yet Hilda cast around for something to detain her, to put off a little longer that awful moment when she would arrive at the beach and face the stares and barely disguised snickers. She consulted the cheval mirror in the corner. The only way she could view the reflection without tears was to pretend it belonged to someone else. Some fat, frumpy old thing, with disappointed eyes.

She missed so many things. She missed her prebaby body. She missed Daddy, the comfort of his arms, the peppery smell of his pipe tobacco. He always made everything all right. Her one small consolation was that he was not around to see what his princess had become. She missed the seasons, the early years in New Hampshire, before Daddy's emphysema forced the family south in search of a kinder climate. Those years remained in her mind, perfectly preserved, like the leaf she had once found encased in ice. There she had felt safe and oh, so treasured.