The glove compartment still held a manual and a pencil stub. I took them out and wrote on the back of the manual the road signs as we passed them:
Carrville, Milstead Goodwins, LaPlace, Hardaway, Thompson, Hector, High Ridge, Postoak, Omega, Sand-field, Catalpa, Banks.
It would be years before I would see them again, except in an atlas of the states.
Outside of Banks, Mama pulled over to the side of the road. We made water in a little pinewood. On such empty roads, our modesty was at little risk. We had tissues for blotting but I thought it wiser not to remark upon the absence of a place to wash our hands.
Then Mama sat behind the wheel and stared down the road toward Banks. She touched up her lipstick in the mirror. She yanked out the ashtray and emptied it out the window onto the side of the road. She lit a new cigarette. When she started the Edsel again, she made a U-turn away from Banks. We passed through Troy and into Elba.
We had driven over one hundred and twenty miles. I longed to have the maps back. I was almost certain that the route we had taken to Elba was easily twice as long as it needed to be, in part because of the detour in the direction of Banks. I had no idea why Banks was of any interest to Mama.
Mama seemed uncertain where to go next. She seized upon the fact that it was past time for dinner—the midday meal in Alabama—and declared that if she did not eat soon, she would faint. In fact, she was more than hungry; she was exhausted.
Elba is a small place in Coffee County. The best thing about it, Mama said, was that we knew nobody there and nobody knew us. She was wrong about that. The best thing about Elba to me was that it was south of Montgomery, the worst was that it was nowhere near far enough south.
No doubt things have changed since those days, and Elba sports a Holiday Inn or a Motel 6, or even something as grand as a Marriott Courtyard, but then, the choice was between the Hotel Osceola, Slattery’s—which was locally called Sluttery’s for its fleas, Mama told me—or a boardinghouse. Mama would sleep in the Edsel before she would stay at a boardinghouse. She explained that everything and everyone in a boardinghouse was so ashamed of themselves that the blinds were always drawn, that the mattresses had all been died on, by somebody or other, and that everyone used the same bathroom, which with the awful food, created a universal constipation, which was all anyone in a boardinghouse ever talked about: being bound up. Impactions, Mama said.
The Hotel Osceola lacked the grandeur of the Hotel Pontchartrain by a country mile. To my surprise, when we entered it, Mama went straight to the desk and asked for the best room. The best room was on the third floor and it was the only room in the whole hotel that had a bathroom to itself. Mama went back to the Edsel with the fat man behind the desk and had him bring in some of our luggage—a suitcase of hers, my little red one, and the footlocker. Mama left me in the lobby while she accompanied the man with the luggage up to the room she had taken, as if she expected to spend the night there. I was disappointed and worried. What if Mama changed her mind and turned around and took us back to Ramparts?
She came down again and we had dinner—in the dining room downstairs, where we could look out at Elba’s Main Street, and speculate on which of the old men sitting, chins on their chests, in the rocking chairs on the verandah of a general store across the street, might actually be dead. At two o’clock, we were the last to be served and all by ourselves. Mama guzzled glass after glass of unsweetened iced coffee and kept complaining to me of the heat, though it was not hot, not at all.
I remember thinking even then, it is a good thing Mama doesn’t worry about me. Because if she thought she was responsible for me too, she would be even worse off in her mind.
“It’s a good thing we have that footlocker upstairs, isn’t it, Calley? Maybe it failed to save your daddy’s life, but it sure as hell is gone save ours.”
That’s how upset Mama was—she said “hell” in a public place. She said “ours” too, reassuring me a little.
Upstairs in the best room, she got way more upset. For the first time since she had tied it on me, she undid from around my neck the silk string with its pair of keys. The one key, of course, was to her cedar chest back in Ramparts; she tossed it onto the counterpane of the bed. Then she knelt by the footlocker to unlock it.
It was empty.
Except for the dark stains of Daddy’s blood.
All color drained from her face. She rocked on her heels and staggered to her feet.
“Oh Jesus God! Jesus God!” she cried, and bolted to the bathroom.
Of course I followed and saw her kneeling at the commode, vomiting the iced coffee-black contents of her stomach.
When she pushed herself back onto her haunches, I dampened a washrag at the basin and gave it to her to wipe her mouth. Then I dampened another and bathed her face as she raised it to me. Her shivering and shuddering and shaking alarmed me. I wanted to run to the telephone and call the desk for a doctor.
She grabbed my wrist and pleaded with me. “It was there this morning, Calley! You saw it! It was there when we got up this morning and it weighed so much, we could hardly move it. The only key was on the string you had around your neck and you never took it off, did you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Did you?”
I had not. But I believed at once that the money had not been stolen from the trunk, not at all.
After we had gotten it out of Ramparts and into the Edsel, and Mama and I had gone back into the house, someone had simply taken the trunk with the money in it and in its place had left the identical trunk, which had once contained Daddy’s dismembered torso. At seven, I had yet to watch enough television or see enough movies to understand that the bloody footlocker should have been in an evidence room in New Orleans. In the end, I picked up that information from police procedural paperback novels, sometime in my early teens. If I had known, I probably would have figured that if Mamadee could fix judges in Alabama, she could fix cops in New Orleans, Louisiana. I still believe it.
Mama began to recover herself, allowing me to help her to her feet and to the bed. She flinched away from the footlocker and closed her eyes so that she would not see it. Once she was off her feet, I went back to the bathroom to wet one of the washrags again with cool water. I folded it over her closed eyes and sat down next to her to take one hand in mine.
“Get that thing out of my sight!” Mama’s words came from between her gritted teeth, behind the mask of the washrag on her eyes.
I was able to shove and drag the footlocker into a closet and close the door. It smelled. It reeked of old blood, like the butcher’s shop. The odor was so foul, I could not understand why we had not smelled it instantly upon entering the room, or how Mama and the man who brought it up could not have noticed.
“What are we gone do?” Mama asked me in a despairing voice.
“What about Fennie?” It was the question Mama expected to hear from me, I think.
“What could Fennie do? We don’t even know her name.”
But Mama got Fennie’s name right this time. By saying we don’t know her name, Mama implied it would be all right if I could provide Fennie’s surname, and furthermore some way of getting a signal of distress to her.
“It’s Verrill,” I said. Mama didn’t care for me to read her too closely. “Verrill. No, that’s not right. Verlow. It’s Verlow.”