Seemed like they always arrived in West Memphis to a sickle moon and the flutter of insects, Lula Mae with a big smile and an expansive hug. The yard drank black water at night and spat up dew in dawn silence. Birds bounced from tree limb to tree limb. You and Jesus searched the grass for dragon’s teeth. Kept them on you as a secret. Rain always fell clear, solid, and slow. After the rain, the sun sailed out into a clear sky. Broad dented leaves — and winged seeds, birch? maple? elm? — sparkled light. Black cherries hung straight and heavy among foliage. You and Jesus pulled snails from their shells, then held up the freed shells to your ears to hear ocean roar. Frogs bellowed, their voices grave, deep, measured. Masters of the earth, they wandered out into the road — yes, the road, a rich mixture of red dirt and red gravel — to stop cars. You and Jesus tossed flattened frogs like Frisbees into the cornfield across the road. Stop that chunkin! Lula Mae screamed from the yard. A shower of leaves and Lula Mae with a mop handle knocking apples, pears, or plums from the trees in her yard. You had to guard your head from falling fruit. You had the same fear of falling when you passed beneath the horseshoe nailed above every door in Lula Mae’s house. Her fruit made the best preserves for your morning toast, eggs, and bacon. Miss Bee’s cornfield grew transparent in the setting sun’s light. Lula Mae pulled the creaking attic stairs down from the ceiling — thick robot legs — unfolded them, and lit a kerosene lamp to a fragrant glow. You and Jesus followed her up the wobbly stairs. Her shadow quivered on the attic ceiling and walls.
MR. BYRON MET THE PROCESSION in Fulton, a good sixty miles from West Memphis, another state, ‘Sippi, near Houston, the family’s beginning place. A little red-colored white man in overalls and a Cat trucker’s cap, the visor pointed right at the sun. He leaned into the window of each limousine and gave instructions to the driver. Follow close behind me, he said. You get lost, just honk.
Who’s that ole white man? Hatch said.
Mr. Byron, Sheila said.
Who?
Mr. Byron.
Who’s that?
Mr. Harrison. His son. Nephew. Grandson.
Who? I don’t know no Harrison.
The people she—
What people?
Questions furled and unfurled into fire. Mr. Byron drove his black car fast as if the cemetery was in danger of disappearing. Fast in transport, fast in arrival.
Do you know how to find this cemetery? Hatch said.
Yes, Sheila said.
Is that white man the only one who know?
Sheila said nothing.
Mr. Byron guided the family through the cemetery. Nowhere else had Hatch seen earth so red. Gravestones shimmered in the high noon light. They followed Mr. Byron past a clutter of crippled tombstones,
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF FLORA
A COLORED WOMAN, WHO DIED JAN. 5, 1826, AGED 104 YEARS
STRONG FAITH, STRONGER, TRUSTING IN HER SAVIOUR
then mounds with handmade crosses, then mounds with no crosses at all. Hatch knew. The Griffith family was buried here. All whose hearts had quit the job. Buried beneath red soil. Beulah had worked for the Byron (Harrison?) family. Koot and Big Judy too, for all Hatch knew. There Candice Griffith. Mr. Byron’s voice banged like a gavel. He pointed to an unmarked grave. Hatch smelled brilliantine on the white man’s hair. There Dave Griffith. There Carrie Sweet Griffith. There Judy Randle. There Buck Randle. Big Judy’s husband. There Arteria Stone. There Nate Stone. There Dave Griffith the Second. The weight of names. All buried in the same red constipated earth. All gone headlong in red clay holes. Only R.L. was missing, interred somewhere in California, foreign soil.
Whosoever will, whosoever will
Hear the loving Father
Call the wanderer home
Whosoever will may come.
We got to bring Sam home, Beulah said. Sheila and Rochelle kept her standing, holding up her arms like broken wings. Bring him here. Gather up the family. Yall ain’t got to wait long. She was speaking to the graves now. I’ll be with you soon. Follow you now if I could.
Hatch and three strangers dressed in black held two wide straps of canvas that cradled the casket over the grave’s yawning red toothless mouth. On the headman’s signal, Hatch released length after muscle-straining length of the strap, like undocking a boat to open water. He lost his footing and almost slipped into the grave.
A WHITE HOUSE comes to you from long-forgotten times. Floats, flutters, flies, a moth-eaten memory.
You reached it by a red string of road that snaked up through the hills — at the foot of the hills, neat white double-level houses, each perfect as a double scoop of ice cream — and from there up to the crown, flat houses like rotting boats, scaling walls, sagging blinds, torn window screens, pieces of curtain, sunlight blasting the exposed ribs and wafting mildew smells as Big Judy gunned her car along the narrow, curving road, yes, right up to the crest of the hill, where her house stuck out under the sunlight. Koot’s house was just down the road, pushed back beneath the shadow of poplar and maple trees, like the oval portraits of every family member (except R.L.’s) pushed back into the space above Koot’s fireplace — as if someone had mashed it there under their palm. A big range house — yes, how big it seemed to you then; years later, you returned to it (Dave’s funeral) to discover that it had shrunken in size, like cotton under excessive heat — sweating in the Fulton summer.
A swirl of summer chickens. An invisible rooster strutting in the sun. Used to have a rooster, Big Judy said. Henry, we called him. Never crow when he sposed to. Never at dawn. But five or six times during the day. But he ruled. If you see my little red rooster, please drive him home. Been no peace in the barnyard since he been gone. The vapors from three or four hogs fenced stomping and grunting in the pen. Big Judy dumped pails and pails of rotten fruit and kernel-depleted corncobs. Hogs roll, a boiling sea of stinking pink.
The ravine behind and just down the hill from the house everyone called the snake pit, a serpent-stricken hissing valley, smoke wreaths during the day and mist at night. Over the years, Big Judy had lost several hogs and chickens to the pit. But the old people would come and sit, bending the legs of the metal folding chairs under their weight of creaking years, in the shade of her concrete driveway, unbothered by the chicken and hog noises and smells or the threat of scorpions and snakes, and suck the sap of memory.
Koot had a long life, Big Judy said. And Mr. Footy treated her good. Now, that Buck. He called me every kinda name, and ain’t none of them in the Bible. Jus the meanest cuss. Couldn get him to walk ten feet down the road and ask Koot fo a cup of sugar.
A flower blazed between an angle of roots. You took a close curious look. The yellow jacket stung you, your jaw puffed up and threatened to explode by the time you made it back to the house and Big Judy powdered it with tobacco — some of Mr. Buck’s chewing snuff — to smoke out the swelling. Bandaged your face good with a shroud of handkerchiefs.
Your jaw swelled so your ears hurt. Pain new and undreamt of. Thankful that you had not been attacked by a snake or one of those blue-green lizards that Big Judy called scorpions. Better off than Koot, killed in a car accident — no, a crash, that claimed, yes, claimed, staked with jagged glass and twisted spikes of metal, the life of a pregnant white woman and the white baby black in her belly, and a second woman who was driving Koot to the hearing-aid store, thrown through a car’s windshield—If it means anything, if it can help, she was killed instantly; she didn’t suffer—her reluctant feet still planted to the passenger side of the floor where they had refused to follow her body roadside. Feel yourself driving through a wet curtain (beads, yes, beads) of glass, like jetting from beneath a pool to break water’s surface; feel yourself flying through air, a bird sailing wind in slow motion, then feel your face covered with crumbs of glass, and a numbing sensation in your feet.