“Listen,” I said. “You people have been through a lot. Lord knows. You’ve lost a lot of people you love. Good people. In a short time. And here’s your last link to one of them, this girl who got dropped on you even though you probably didn’t want her, but here she is, and she was Sam’s, and you loved Sam, and Sam is gone, and she’s all you’ve got left of Sam. So you’ve got your loyalty to Sam, and you don’t want to hurt this girl, and neither do I. Neither does anybody. But there’s stuff going on here that doesn’t smell right. I’ve seen it all, and now I’ve got the spiritual gift of seeing through it all. I watched my Ed’s head crushed between the cab and the bed of an old pickup truck, and I watched my housekeeper fall off the side of a cliff with her house back when we still lived in the mountains. I don’t know what to do with any of it. All I know is there’s this girl, and one way or another she’s in over her head, and we’ve got to get her home so she can make some kind of life for herself and not have everybody just thinking of her as the widow at the ripe old age of fourteen or whatever she is.”
I went on like that for a while, just provoking. It didn’t hurt me one bit to do it. I just beat on them like that. When an English word wouldn’t do, I used a French word, and when French wasn’t crude enough, I hammered them with Kreyol. I played the tired old widow and I played Ervin’s monster come down from the north to chew and spit. Finally, Sisters Patty and Thelma started talking a little. Yes, they said, Sam was a weird egg. Yes, Sheila was a tough nut to crack. It’s not that they knew things and were choosing to withhold them from me, their interrogator. They didn’t know, and it’s what they didn’t know that wore them at the edges. What they had to offer was gossip, idle talk, conjecture, theories half-formed. What they had was nothing edifying. What they had wasn’t much. That’s why the hemming and that’s why the hawing.
“Ladies,” I said, “if theory’s all we got, then theory’s all we got.”
The long silence. Then Patty: “Kenel and Brother Sam were very close.”
Like brothers, Thelma said.
“After Sam died, Kenel started to come around a lot more. Usually he kept to his fields, and that’s where he spent his time with Sam. But after Sam died, he was always bringing baskets to Sheila. Food, clothing, things he bought or his wife bought at the market.”
“Things he couldn’t afford,” Thelma said. “Not possibly.”
“Did you ask Sheila about these things?” I said.
“Yes,” Patty said. “Indirectly, but that didn’t get anywhere. Then directly. But she was just a mess. Her face turned witch ugly. It took so little to set off the waterworks. Once it started, she’d go off to her bedroom and shut the door, and you’d hear her for hours. She wouldn’t answer if you knocked. Such a horrible sound, and you could hear everything that came out of that room anyway, because the walls were so thin, and because of where it was. So we just stopped asking.”
“Where do you think he got the money?” I said. Their speculations were thin. Maybe she had some stashed away, and Kenel came and got it and made purchases on her behalf. Maybe Sam left some of his money with Kenel. It was no secret the troubles were coming. It was just a matter of when. Maybe he thought he ought to have a backup plan if this place got tore up. I said these were reasonable possibilities, and that’s why I didn’t buy them. They believed something darker, and might as well be out with it. They looked at each other. The men glared at the women. I had a pretty good idea what the women were going to say.
“We think maybe Kenel was his backup plan,” Patty said.
“But Kenel has a wife,” I said.
“Kenel has three or four wives,” Patty said, “stashed away who knows where.”
“What’s one more?” Thelma said.
By now, the men had stopped glaring at them. Some leaky water pipe was dripping every few seconds, and the men turned their heads in the direction of the showers every time a drop hit the drain. The women seemed to be waiting for the men to say something, and I waited them out. They fiddled with their ears and they fiddled with the creases in their pants. Finally T. C. gave in. “It’s just a theory,” he said. “It’s just talk, and it’s not kind, and it’s probably not true.”
I didn’t have to say it was midnight, and Sheila was in Kenel’s house, and not in her own bed, and not for the first night, I gathered.
Well, Ervin, this story doesn’t end well or end at all, for that matter. The next morning I set off with Patty and Thelma for Kenel’s house. When we got there, the door was open, the bedsheet curtains were gone from the windows, the inside was picked bare. Everybody and everything that was there was there no more. We interviewed the neighbors, and the neighbors were predictably ignorant concerning these matters. We interviewed the relatives, and nobody had a thing of value to share with us. Somebody said maybe they went to Jacmel, somebody said Belle Anse, somebody else said Miragoâne. All of these were places none of these bodies have ever been, I can assure you. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re all some place three mountains over, sharing some uncomfortable space with some children Kenel hasn’t seen since they were born.
What to do? I guess you could call the FBI kidnapping squad if you want, Ervin, and let Kenel Depitor take a bullet for the crime of doing a favor for his dead friend. They call us colonialists, and that’s what anybody’d expect, right? My advice is wait it out. Soon enough, the money will run out, or she’ll get homesick or she’ll get sick sick, and one fine afternoon she’ll walk or be carried through the front gate, dehydrated and weak with diarrhea, and one of those nurses will run an I.V., and then T. C. and Larry will send her stateside. As for me, I want to wash my hands of the whole sorry affair. What I want to know is: What kind of man was Brother Samuel Tillotson, anyway? And what was Brother Joe thinking, letting him bring that girl here in the first place? And what kind of girl is she, to get mixed up in a distant country with one man she hardly knew, and now another? And what kind of parents must she have, to let us deal in fact-finding trips and bureaucratic reports instead of getting their old behinds down here on a plane and bringing their little girl home? And what kind of people are we, in a time like this, to let her grieve it out alone in that thin-walled bedroom? Why wasn’t she put on the morning plane to Miami the day after Brother Sam was buried?
As usual, the questions pile up like dug dirt, and the big ditch forms for lack of answers. Days like these I want to throw myself in it and sleep the long sleep, but that’s not what we do. As soon as I’m able, I’m gonna get myself back to Okap and lead some Bible studies and oversee some women’s meetings, and plant some trees, and teach some children to read.
V.
Mrs. Tina Brocken, Loxahatchee, Florida, to Miss Anna Ratliff, West Palm Beach, Florida, May 10, 1993.
Im so sorry to here the news about your daddy passing after such a long and bravery struggle. I dont even know if you remember me because you was so little when we knew your daddy. We knew your momma too and she might remember us. If she does, you say hey to her for us and you tell her we dont care what anybody says we think she is a fine person. She was always a good lady to all of us even though there was problems between her and your daddy thats the things that happens to everybody in the world and when you get older you will know it too. You are an adult now so you like to already do but thats neither here nor there. Kay-Sara-Sara, like that old French song goes.
I will do my best to write all the things I want to say to your daddy in this letter. I want you to forgive me for not coming to the funeral service to say them for my own self and to his face. There is a lot of reasons for it. Some of them are because I don’t go to the Baptist church anymore even though I still believe in God and pray in Jesus name. I have gray in my hair people dont gossip probably like they used to or even remember me but maybe some do I dont like there stairs when I pass by and what they are thinking about me and what kind of mother is walking by them when I walk by. Also I am not a disrespectful person especially to somebody like Leslie Ratliff when I first heard about the brain cancer I just cried and cried you can ask anybody around because they all heard me. Not just because I felt sorry for him with his pain or but because it really is such a blow to loose him we loved him so much.