“You’re going to get worms, doing that.” That’s what Jimmy Lee says every time he catches me biting the dirt out from under my fingernails. To myself I think: Uh uh, Jimmy Lee, it’s the other way around, eventually. But I keep quiet on account of that’s the kind of observation gets on his nerves something awful.

Got plenty of the stuff under my nails this morning. Which makes Jimmy Lee say he feels like he’s married to a farm worker, though even he can’t deny how good the yard’s looking.

To me this dirt tastes bitter with a clean undertaste, which I reckon is a kind of funny contradiction, but true. And I could probably lie here on my bed half the day cleaning myself and trying not to think about yesterday, but eventually what I’m trying not to think about would push itself through, so I reckon I best get going.

My friend Charlie Simpson says dirty fingernails are the surest sign of a serious gardener. When I went down to his store the other day to get some plant food, Charlie said I looked like a little girl in my overalls. Said I was the cutest thing he’s seen all day. Mildred Pyncheon heard him, too. He didn’t lower his voice or anything, and I saw her eyes flick up and down at me like I was wearing hot pants and a halter top, heard her give a little humph under her breath.

Charlie’s always talking like that, but he doesn’t mean a thing by it. Everybody knows he’s faithful as a lapdog to Emmaline, whose daddy after all left him that feed-and-seed store where he’s made them a pretty good living the last 20 or so years. So it’s not like he doesn’t have a lot to be grateful for, though I once sat next to Emmaline at a Jaycees’ supper and was amazed at how stiff she was able to keep her back and how her top lip was so thin you sometimes couldn’t tell if she even had one. Hope she didn’t catch me staring, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away—for some reason I found it fascinating, that lip. It does kind of go with the rest of her face, come to think of it, what with that jaw cocked forward, like a bulldog with a certain mind-set.

Funny about Charlie Simpson. He doesn’t look romantic or anything. He’s some older than me, around 45, I guess, and he’s not but about five-eight or so. His body’s wiry, like the black hairs on his arms, which seem long enough to comb, almost. On the top of his head he’s missing a fair amount of hair, though that seems to be the only place, and he wears these little gold-rimmed glasses that make him look like an accountant and mostly shade his eyes.

When you get to know him better, you see that Charlie’s eyes behind those glasses have silky, dark lashes and heavy lids like that Russian ballet dancer’s—lids that look like they’re half asleep, or hiding something. Ever since I noticed it, I been torn between wanting to ask him to open his eyes up wide and being afraid of what I might see if he did.

He does have one bad habit that I know of, which I try my best to overlook. He’s always moving his privates around, in front of whoever happens to be standing there. It’s not like he does it on purpose or even knows he’s doing it. He’ll just reach down and take a little dig or rearrange himself, holding a regular conversation all along. Maybe he used to play baseball. I don’t know. Tell you one thing, though: it’s hard to keep your eyes where they belong and your mind on the discussion at hand. No pun intended.

Charlie says I’m one of the best natural gardeners he ever saw. He can’t believe I’ve only been planting things in a big way like this for a year or so. Must of been hiding my light under a bushel, he says, and when he grins I swear his whole face changes, like electric lights blazing on sudden in the dead of night.

From “Egg Timer”

The ceiling fan spun lazily above. Outside the window of her bedroom in Aunt Cat’s house, birds sang in the branches of old oaks. It would be another scorcher, sticky and still. Ginnie turned over, picked up Exodus from the bedside table, and began to read.

As when she’d read that other Leon Uris book, Mila 18, Ginnie felt herself immersed in the Jews’ struggle. She was in the ghetto with heroic resisters. She reeled with their pain, their search for the place they belonged, the terrible injustice. Life was unfair; oh, she knew all about that. She wanted to fight alongside them, yearned to be Jewish—to belong utterly to something that mattered. She often imagined changing her name to Leah or Delilah—something Biblical and ancient. Anything but Virginia Lucile.

Who was Ginnie Lackland anyway? The wild girl her father fumed over in his early morning hours, the one busting out all over, with a swing to her walk and that sly smile that rocked him? The stealthy little eavesdropper, her mother’s night owl, hoarding the family’s secrets like treasures? Or the smart girl her teachers complimented—though she didn’t work too hard, did she, and then she had that smart-alecky streak. Or was she the girl her friends knew, who’d take almost any dare, climbing onto the back of a motorcycle behind a boy she’d just met on the beach or slugging back Southern Comfort and then sneaking dazed-faced into her bedroom through the window, which she’d been twice caught in the act of. Time for some time out, her mother had said, before depositing her at Aunt Cat’s. Her father wasn’t speaking to her. She was, she knew, a great disappointment and a bad role model for her little sister.

Despairing for the world and her place in it, Ginnie wept.

When Aunt Cat knocked and then opened the door without waiting for an answer, she found her niece awash. “Ah, sweetie,” she said. “It’s not so bad. We gone have us a fine time, you and me.” She held her arms out to Ginnie, who couldn’t figure out anything to do but fall into them. Her cheek lay against the rose-colored silk of her aunt’s peignoir; she had seven identical sets in different colors. For the last two days, she’d worn them till noon.

She stroked Ginnie’s hair. “Sometimes life is just hard, idn’t?”

Aunt Cat was a divorcée. Ginnie liked the sound of that, its whiff of decadence, especially here in Red Hill, where it was more often whispered than spoken. She’d heard her mother say Aunt Cat had had to give up committee work at First Presbyterian after she and Uncle Vern split up, even though he still got to be an elder. Aunt Cat had stopped going, Ginnie knew—which meant she didn’t have to either, for the next week. A relief—church had made her itchy ever since she’d discovered that she was an atheist, last year, in the middle of reading Atlas Shrugged. She never actually spoke the words to the Lord’s Prayer now, just mouthed them, and she refused to shut her eyes during prayers, preferring instead to study people’s faces when they weren’t looking. Her mother’s eyelids, for example, fluttered like she was dreaming, while her father’s face smoothed out and his chin lifted. When she tired of looking at them, she would stare at Mrs. Eleanor Townsend, the base chaplain’s wife—a born gossip, according to Ginnie’s mother—who looked in prayer like a blank-faced idiot, lips blabbing loosely even when talking to the Lord.

Looking now at her aunt’s face, Ginnie saw shadows under the eyes and in the hollow of cheekbones. Everybody in Red Hill knew what Ginnie’d known practically forever—that Uncle Vern had been stepping out on Aunt Cat for years and had three children by a white trash woman he’d finally set up house with. The youngest had been the final straw—a girl they’d named Vernelle. That was just throwing it in her face, Aunt Cat had wailed to Ginnie’s mother, the week she’d stayed with them when the breakup happened, almost a year ago. Uncle Vern still paid for Aunt Cat’s house and clothes and food—the least he could do, Ginnie’s mother said to her father, who hadn’t replied. Uncle Vern couldn’t be their friend anymore, and she knew her father missed him. He was surrounded by women, he sometimes joked. Or half-joked. 

The smell of cigarettes and perfume filled Ginnie’s head. Aunt Cat wore only Lanvin—Laaa-vaaa, she called it, squeezing out the syllables through her nose—from Paris, France, she would murmur when anybody commented on how nice she smelled.  

“We’re gone have us a time, sweetie,” her aunt repeated. “In fact,” she put one finger on her niece’s chin and tilted her head up; her eyes, Ginnie saw, shone almost to overflowing. “I have a surprise for you.” 

— Winner, Broad River Review's RASH Award for Fiction, 2023; finalist, 2020 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Fiction, december Magazine

From “Lost Weekend”

Sitting in the movie theater next to her best friend Susannah Beaufain, Ginnie Lackland wasn’t watching the screen, even though she’d pictured herself as Scout Finch a million times since reading To Kill a Mockingbird last year and here was Scout in the flesh, and her father Atticus, looking like Gregory Peck. Scout’s mother was dead and Atticus was a hero. Ginnie’s mother was alive but back in South Carolina right now, where her mother had died two weeks ago. Ginnie’s father flew planes for the air force and had maybe been a hero back in the war with Japan and Germany before Ginnie was born—which was funny since now they lived in Germany and had German friends. (Luckily, her father had bombed the Japanese.) Last year, before they’d moved to base housing, Ginnie’s family had been the only Americans living in a little village outside of Wiesbaden, and her father shared beers some afternoons with their neighbor, the village police chief. Ginnie had heard her father tell her mother one night that Hans, the policeman, had been an SS officer in the war. She knew Atticus Finch would never drink beer with a former Nazi, but her father did have black hair with streaks of silver and a deep voice that always sounded sure of itself, so there was that.

Ginnie couldn’t keep her mind on the movie. For one thing, seeing the hatefulness of the white people reminded her of that bad stuff in Montgomery a few years back, when they’d lived there. And it wasn’t over yet—lately it had been in the news, even in Germany, that white people had bombed a church and killed four Negro girls. Ginnie thought for a minute about her little sister Hannah being blown to bits; her mind lingered on it as she watched Atticus standing in front of the courthouse and Scout coming between him and the angry men, shaming them.

Next to her, Suz whispered, pointing, “Is that Sam, over there with Monique?” Ginnie squinted but couldn’t see through the dimness. The question made her think of Charlie Durant, her boyfriend of the past six months, who should be beside her tonight but wasn’t because—Ginnie glanced at Suz, the only person who knew this—because Ginnie was supposed to have had sex with Charlie three weeks ago but had at the last minute chickened out. He’d gotten right up, said he was tired of her giving him the blue balls, whatever that was, and left her there in the spare bedroom of Terry McGee’s house, where they’d snuck away from spin-the-bottle games and into what Charlie called their little pleasure palace. He hadn’t spoken to her since, even though she’d left messages with his mother twice. At school, when Charlie passed her in the hall, his blue eyes stayed fixed at a point above her head.

Every night that week, Ginnie had turned it over in her mind. She wanted to be Charlie’s girlfriend. He was the second most popular boy at Pershing Junior High, and she liked being seen with him at the rec dances and at school, him smiling down at her. He had honey-brown hair with a wave in the front; he was funny and smart, too, and played guitar. And it was more than that, even if Ginnie didn’t know how to put the rest into words—because it wasn’t about words; it was about something deeper, some foreign urge she couldn’t make sense of, rising inside her.

Ginnie and Charlie had gone this far, in this order: held hands in the movies (though Charlie would rather trace feather-light circles on her knee, which made her insides jump); kissed (first on the bus, going to Mannheim for a basketball game; twice in a cab coming back from the indoor pool on Mainzer Strasse; and for a dizzying hour last month when Suz’s parents had gone out for the night). Charlie had come over with Lucas, Suz’s boyfriend—that time they’d kissed lying down and Charlie had pressed himself into Ginnie’s leg, moaning enough to scare her; which Suz later said was good, normal; she suggested, in fact, that Ginnie moan a little too, and see what happened. Suz was the kind of girl who just knew things; she was bringing Ginnie along, she said.

In between being brought along, Ginnie started getting calls from Charlie every night after supper. She and her sisters had a strict time limit of five minutes, two calls a night. The phone was in the hall between Ginnie and Hannah’s bedroom and their parents’; people in the living room could hear just about every word, so Ginnie would pull the phone into the bedroom and sit on the floor while Charlie whispered words to her—what he wanted them to do—And then you’ll lie down and I’ll pull your shirt up over your head and I’ll look and look, would that be all right; would that be fine? And Ginnie would say, quietly, Yes, Charlie—that’s what he asked her to say: Yes, Charlie, and so she did. And can I push up your bra and touch you, just with the tip-tip-tip of one finger? Yes, Charlie; and Can I lift up your skirt and look and look? Yes, Charlie. And touch, he asked, his whispers like panting. She only breathed, and he said it again—and touch?—drawing out the cccchh sound. Ginnie could feel her own queasy rising then. Charlie would tell her: Say yes; say it, Ginnie. And she would, whispering in time to his can I and can I; and out of the blue her father’s voice would sound at the door—Young lady: time—and she wouldn’t have heard him coming at all. She would say, in a chirpy voice: ‘Kay, Susannah, see you. Charlie would moan. She would stay in her room till her father’s footsteps faded, then stare into the mirror to see if she looked different.

— published in Oxford American’s Best of the South 2009

From “A Safe, Secret Place”

One, two—Ginnie counted to herself the space between thunderbolt and lightning crack. “Run for it!” she hollered, noise and light exploding in her head, and the two of them fled through sheets of silver water. Ruth got there first, flinging open the back door and clambering in, Ginnie right behind. Dripping, breathless, they lay for a moment in the stillness of the car before the thunder struck again and the ground beneath and air above trembled and lit fire.

“Lord a mercy!” Ruth gasped, head bent towards the floorboards, water streaming from her tight-knit braids.

Ginnie leaned over, too, sluicing the rain from her legs with the flat of one hand. “We are so wet!” she said, grinning. “And we are safe!” A person could never get struck by lightning inside a car, anybody knew that. She had probably saved both their lives by her quick thinking when the storm had brewed up out of nowhere, ambushing them in their secret place, the alcove in the shrubbery between Gramma’s house and Miss Myrtle’s, next door.

From there, earlier, they had watched Ginnie’s grandmother hang clothes on the line. They’d seen Uncle Vern pick up Ginnie’s father to go fishing; they’d watched her older sister Kari slouch out in her jeans and long white shirt. Going to the rec center, she’d said, shrugging and sighing impatiently, when Ginnie’s mother had called out the window to ask. Her little sister Hannah was down for a nap, Mama reading beside her; Gramma, too, likely. In his room off the back porch, what Uncle Clarence did was mostly a mystery. She and Ruth liked to spy on him—maybe they could get a peek at him taking off his leg!—but they’d been caught peering into his windows twice today by Ruth’s mama, Sarah, who said she’d tan them if they did it again. Sarah had been washing up lunch dishes the last time they glimpsed her through the kitchen window, before the storm. Now she was probably tidying the front rooms in her quiet way, maybe listening to the radio turned low, crackling along to the lightning. Sarah worked for Gramma one day a week and for Aunt Cat the rest of the time. Ginnie’s grandmother couldn’t afford help, but Aunt Cat said she reckoned she could spare her girl once a week to help out her mama. She and Uncle Vern lived all by themselves in a big, fancy house across town.

Uncle Vern and Aunt Cat were just one of the seemingly endless clutch of kinfolk the Lacklands had in Red Hill, South Carolina. It was August, and Ginnie and her family were at the tail end of what her father called their annual RNR, always spent in this sleepy town her parents had been from before her father had joined back up in the Air Force, after the war. Now they were from nowhere.

The days when Sarah brought Ruth to Gramma’s were Ginnie’s favorites, especially when all her girl cousins were up in the mountains at church camp. She liked Ruth way better than any of them anyhow, though she could never say so.

A huge crack! shook the car. “I don’t know how all that safe we sitting,” said Ruth. “Might get us spun up inside a tornado, whirled some other else altogether.”

“Like Dorothy!” Ginnie agreed. The thought made her heart race in a crazy, happy way.

Ruth blinked, her face blank.

“In the Wizard of Oz?” Ginnie’d seen the movie on TV. It had carved a huge space in her mind in which mean monkeys flew, an ugly witch peered into a crystal ball, and a scared, lost girl found her way home. “You know.”

But Ruth didn’t. Ginnie tried to tell it, but could only recount what she remembered—bits of scene—the storm door shutting Dorothy out, the witch pedaling the bicycle, the ruby slippers. “The sands slipping through the hourglass!” she said. “Just like Gramma’s egg timer!” She shuddered when she thought of it; Ruth seemed unmoved.

“We can go look at the hourglass,” Ginnie offered up, “soon as the storm quits.” Lightning crackled through the air at that—ha!—so close they could smell singe.

“We got no TV,” Ruth said, shrugging. She was the one who usually got to tell the stories. For years, she’d spun tales for Ginnie—of haints and the Plat-eye, monsters that wanted little girls and would keep coming for them, even when they had no arms or legs, like the terrible Wish-plop, who would drag himself up the stairs of your house and take you while you slept. Ginnie dreamed of them; her nightmares were one reason she woke and roamed the house, one reason she knew who else was up then too—often her mother, on the couch, sometimes reading and sipping something smoky, sometimes breathing softly in the dark. But in the mornings she was always chipper, making Ginnie wonder if she’d dreamed the whole thing. She would hear her parents’ voices rise and fall, standing outside their bedroom door some nights: her mother’s murmur, her father’s firm, low rumble. She could hear Kari grind her teeth, Hannah’s soft, even breaths; the drip from the kitchen faucet. It seemed to Ginnie that in those dark wanderings she was all Listener: absorbent, sorting through the secret sounds of her night-time family, trying to shape sense of them. Trying, too, to hold off monsters that could swallow little girls whole.

Inside the car the windows had steamed up with the girls’ breath. The world outside had disappeared, only the boom!-crack!-slash! of storm to remind them of it.

Ruth lay her head back against the seat, sighing up at the roof like she might wish to rise through it. Ginnie sometimes sensed that in her friend—a sudden drop of interest, a desire to be away somewhere else. She recognized it—she felt the same with her little sister Hannah, also with her girl cousins, who just wanted to play with dolls and pretend stoves that made fake cookies. Baby stuff. She was glad they weren’t around. Ruth was a year older, and the gap between nine and ten seemed vast to Ginnie—double digits: she couldn’t wait to be that old.

“Want to play a game?” she asked.

“What kind?” said Ruth, not even turning her head.

“I don’t know.” She paused. “We’re in the car. Want to pretend we’re going somewhere and when we get there, we—”

“No.” Ruth shook her head.

Ginnie thought. “Sometimes we play the alphabet game. That’s where you—”

“Uh-uh,” said Ruth, wearily.

Ginnie remembered a game her older sister’s friends had played at Kari’s birthday party that year. One of the girls had suggested a talking game.

“I’ve got it!” said Ginnie. “ Let’s play Secrets!”

Ruth tipped her head. At least she had her attention.

“See, it’s a game where you tell each other stuff you’ve never told before.” She deepened her voice to a solemn pitch: “The deepest, darkest, truest secrets of our lives.” A one-two punch of thunder and lightning punctuated her words, and the air inside the car thickened. The hair on Ginnie’s arms prickled, like when Ruth told haint stories.

She waited for another humph. Instead Ruth said, softly: “You go first.”

— published in Modern Language Studies, 2014

“I want you to come to my church this Sunday.” The quiet voice on the telephone made Jorie’s head spin. She’d risen too quickly when Sallie had woken her, saying, “It’s Lije, calling you.”

She was speechless.

His steady voice on the phone: “Will you come, Miss Jorie?”

“Lije.” She could see him clear as if he stood before her, reaching out his hand. Expecting her to rise to what lay before them.

“Miss Jorie?”

“I’m afraid—I’m not—I don’t go to church, Lije.”

“You don’t go to church?” A silence. “Huh.”

“I have tried,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s not for me.”

“Oh.” He let the silence grow.

“What would your grandmother have to say about my coming to your church, Lije? Does she know you’ve asked me?”

“Well—I think she’d say the house of the Lord is open to everybody—I think.” A pause. “She’d say Jesus lives there.”

“Huh,” said Jorie. “Do white people come to your church, Lije?”

A beat. “Sometimes; some do.”

She thought about those double doors she’d driven past all these years without more than a glance at the marquee, with its community announcements and Bible verses. What would happen if she walked through them? Woman’s set on something bound to bring a world of trouble to one of ours, they might whisper. Got her pick of white-folk churches up and down this road: Why poke into ours? Would someone guide her to a back pew, or to the door? Stare straight ahead and pretend she wasn’t there, intruding on their sacred place?

“I’m afraid—I can’t, Lije.” Silence. “I don’t think your gran would like it.”

“Okay, well.” He took a breath. “It starts at 9:30 but you need to be there at 9:15 to find a parking place.”

“Lije—”

“Oh, and Miss Jorie?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a hat?”

It was the hat Lije saw first from the front porch of New Faith. Red—and big. Really big. He recognized the car as it stopped and Mr. Sam came round to open her door. When he took her arm she kept looking down, so all Lije could see from his elevation was that scarlet circle as she bent, then straightened.

Lije sensed the stir on the porch, though nobody spoke. It was like they all held breath for the time it took him to get moving: down the steps, to the car, offering up his arm in place of Mr. Sam’s.

“Will you walk with me, Miss Jorie?”

She stared into his face.

“It’s 9:20. Fixing to shut the doors. Want to let’s go find our place?”

On the porch she saw the deacons in their black suits, white shirts, and red vestments, ushering in the last of the congregants.

Lije offered his arm.

From her seat up front with the other deaconesses, Mary scanned the crowded sanctuary. Where was the boy? She and Lije had come in together, but he wasn’t sitting in his spot next to Miss Loretta Gadsden. About time to start, too: deacons seating latecomers, church-goers trading gossip before having to hush and open themselves to the Lord’s gospel.

Mary saw the hat before she saw Lije. It was hard to miss, the swoop of it so wide and deep she registered her shock that anybody besides a deaconess would be daring a red hat. When she saw the face under it, her jaw dropped, but only for an instant. Gap-mouthed fool, she thought, grabbing up the program. Her face burned.

Into her church! With Lije! Wearing a red hat! Mary wished with all her being that she could reach up and remove her own red hat—or better yet, take a flying leap across the pews and snatch the offending one off that ridiculous woman, march her straight up the aisle and deposit her at the side of the road. Her eyes stung with fury.

The men’s chorus had been singing for ten minutes before Mary could still her trembling. She’d failed to stand, knees too weak with anger to hold her. Her fellow deaconess Beulah Drayton, seated behind her, pushed on her shoulder. Mary kept her head down. Beulah bent and whispered fiercely. “What’s in this world is wrong with you, Mary Murray Hutchins! Raise yourself, woman! Folks are looking!”

She didn’t budge. Beulah was a big woman—she bent her knees into Mary’s back, applying an unrelenting pressure. “Love lifted me!” she poured the words down upon Mary’s head. Voices everywhere resounded. Souls in danger, look above, they sang. Out of the angry waves. Voices rejoicing, knees in her back, Beulah’s bossy self—nothing could lift the red heat from her center. Be saved today, they sang—but Mary felt past saving. She fell into a red-hot trance.

“God said unto his people: ‘A new heart will I give you!’” Reverend Mikell’s proclamation pierced like an arrow. “A new heart.” He leaned forward and chuckled. “And we all understand about this next part, don’t we?” Amens chorused. “That’s right—we know it. Jesus—” and here came the reverend’s signature pause, the name making the whole congregation lean in for his next words—“is a heart-fixer!”

Mary didn’t know how long he’d been preaching when she heard those words in his rich, round voice—the voice of God, some called it. Throughout the service, she’d continued to stare down into her lap, not standing for songs and prayers, not giving in to the pressure of Beulah’s knees. She’d not raised her eyes even when Reverend Mikell called the children up to the mourner’s bench to kneel, bowing their heads to pray. It was her favorite part of the service: those sweet faces; the preacher’s tender touch on their heads—the Future, he called them.

But she would not be moved.

The preacher’s heart-fixer words pierced, though, and she lifted her head to look at the pew where Lije had sat every Sunday of his life. There he was, precious boy, squeezed between Sister Loretta and that patch-eyed white woman in her ugly red hat. Those two women kept their eyes on the pulpit, but Lije was staring at her, gaze steady. Mary blinked against the heat of it. What did the child want?

Lije’s stare brought her to her feet, finally, for the last hymn: Some bright morning, when this world is over, I’ll fly away. There stood her last remaining child to raise, holding the book open for that white woman, her mouth wide with song: Hallelujah by and by. Mary found her own strong voice, finally. She could sing louder and truer—from the heart—what that white woman could never feel in the depths of hers.

Each time the I’ll fly away came back around, though, Mary’s whole being filled with fear. He will, a voice in her depths whispered, Lije will; she trembled in the face of it. He will fly. And you can’t stop it.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
Louise Glück, “The Wild Lilac”

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” —1 Corinthians 13, verse 12

PROLOGUE

Lucile Gallivant
Red Hill, South Carolina
1947

This morning I dreamt I held a seine net—the kind fishermen catch minnows in—part stretched out in one hand before me; part in the other, reached behind; part in my teeth. Never held a net like that before, but in this dream, I did. When I tossed it, the net made a perfect circle before settling on the surface of the water. The weights sank; I waited—patient, counting—then pulled the string at the top and hauled my catch behind me, to dry land. When I opened the net, fish and shrimp and small, shiny nuggets radiated light, gleaming rose and sand and gold.

For nine months now, my dreams have been of fire, not water. Nine months since I moved into this girlhood home of mine, nine months of looking back on my thirty-six years of life. When my daddy died last year he left me this old house. Why I don’t know—consolation for his abandonment, maybe. It’s the place I was conceived and born in, the one whose window I slipped one long leg and then the next out of in my own leaving, all those years ago. Holed up in here now, trying to see what to do about the remnants of my life with Will and Rose Forsythe, which fill the cellar below me. Sometimes at night seems like I hear them down there, all those patient files and records, letters and affidavits—murmuring, wailing, crying out: Don’t forget us; don’t let us go.

But I want to. Let it all burn: That notion came to me in dreams months back, has been my steady nighttime visitation. Let the flames take what’s left to bear witness to Will’s life, the work. And this damned old house, full of smells and sighs and craziness. Why not heed those hell-hot visions, take a torch to every last shred? Me included—I’d just as soon fling myself in amongst the flames, let them lick me till I die, me and the precious work. Red multitudes, I’ve dreamed—gorgeous—our black ashes mingled and flung skyward.

That’s what I had in mind last night, creeping down creaky cellar stairs to plan it: where to pour the kerosene, where to stand when I struck the match; I could see myself, arms wide in welcome.

But walking one last time through that graveyard of paper, my feet led me to a back corner and a pile I’d put clean out of my mind. Rose’s journals lay there, the ones she’d kept since she was a girl; a batch of letters; a stack of Will’s old photographs, along with notes from that book he started a few years before he died, trying to explain it—his gift—to the world. He never could tell it. Who could, he said, the day he put those papers up for good, his voice bitter, how it often was in those last days.

Who could? I heard him ask that clear as if he’d whispered it direct. Then I hauled that stuff up and piled it in this living room, and after that took the kerosene back out to the shed—at least for now; can’t abide the smell. Since then I’ve sat contemplating the whole mess, falling in and out of dream and memory, one twined in the other. Voices long gone mingling, whispering. Multitudes to parse and ponder.

Traveling through time taxes a body. Hold on.

PART ONE

LUCILE
Red Hill, South Carolina
1926

I FIRST LAID EYES on Wilkins Forsythe nine years ago in the living room of the hotel suite he shared with his wife and their son. It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon in downtown Savannah. I was seventeen.

From behind me I felt the heat of Rufus Ridenhour’s breath on my neck. He’d been courting me, I reckon you could say, for a while. Right up to that minute he’d seemed like my one chance at salvation.

“This here’s the young lady I been telling y’all about—takes dictation like nobody’s business.” He gave me a little poke. “Miss Lucile Gallivant!”

The wife moved first, standing between her husband and me, offering out her hand—to be shook, I reckoned. Rufus poked again, and I stepped forward.

I was soaked to the skin, on account of standing out in the rain waiting to be interviewed and maybe hired on as live-in secretary and helper to Wilkins Forsythe, this so-called “psychic diagnostician.” Not that I had the scantest notion what that meant; I was mostly wet, hungry, and near-about homeless. But here was this dried-up looking woman with her hand out. Didn’t she know it wasn’t her I needed to see?

Looked past her skinny self to the man Rufus claimed had the power to go to sleep and see the past and future, bring the sick back from the brink. Nothing much to see, I took that in quick; I’d had practice sizing up men: early forties, thinning hair; tall and slim, shoulders stooped, eyes mild and blue and only some curious as he stared at me through silver-rimmed glasses. An insurance salesman, maybe, or a preacher. I was ready to say my pleased-to-meet-you’s and make for the door.

But that steady gaze of his wouldn’t let me go, would it? Not even blinking, and maybe I didn’t either, just stared back; and all of a sudden felt cleaned out head to toe, as if he could see the all of me—everything I’d been, would be: could be—the worst, and the best. My body set to shaking, like the world had taken up a tremble under my feet. Knees went so weak I thought I might pitch forward, one big sopping mess. Hadn’t been for his wife’s reaching out to steady me, reckon I’d a been a goner on the spot.

“Why, you’re wet, dear girl!” She stepped back.” And starving, too, I imagine? Let me fix you a little something.”

But I didn’t give two hoots for that kind of fixing. I focused instead on her long-legged husband as he moved toward the sofa. What had he seen in me?

He turned his back abruptly. “Follow me.” He didn’t look my way, just settled himself on the couch. “Ready?” he asked, voice abrupt, like he already doubted I was. All I knew was that Rufus had told me was I better muster the best scribbling of my life.

The wife gave me a little push. I didn’t turn to her, just kept my eyes on him.

“Yessir, if you are, Mr. Forsythe, sir.”

Without another word, he stretched out on the couch. How strange to see that thin, lanky body lying so still, hands crossed over his chest like a dead man’s. Even though Rufus had coached me, it took my breath.

“Let’s see what we can see,” he said.

The wife moved toward a chair by his head; I reckoned the one at his feet was for me. Rufus handed over a pad and pencil and stepped away from us.

“We have before us Milford Brownell, 3586 High Street, Kansas City, Missouri,” the wife announced, reading from what looked like a telegram.

I looked from him to her, pencil trembling in my hand.

“Write it down, Miss Gallivant,” she said softly. “Word for word.”

I began, the tips of my fingers tingling.

“We see the body,” he said, in a deep, slow voice. Nothing more for what seemed like an age, and then: “We find the physical injury, which began with a fall and, untreated, has festered.” A short pause: “The patient has come to depend on his condition to shirk his duties,” the voice intoned, “paining those who employ and care for him.”

He continued to dictate at a pretty quick clip, using all kinds of fancy talk. But I kept up—my time at the Crittenden Home had taught me well and I’d practiced after, hoping to advance myself out of waitressing. Always won the spelling bees in grade school, too.

He stopped on a dime. “We are through for now,” he said, sitting up to stretch, not a glance for me. My fingers needed rubbing, but I stayed still till Rose took my arm, signaling for me to follow her. I looked for Rufus but he had his back to me, washing his hands at the kitchen sink.

She led me to a room where a typewriter and chair were set up next to a small bed. “Do your best, dear girl,” she said, patting my shoulder.

From that room, fingers flying, I heard their voices and my own name, drifting in from the living area. Fierce whispers, little snippets: She can, she could, she needs. And his voice: too young, too untried. And finally this: NO!—not angry, just steady. And NO again, louder.

The wet had soaked into my clothes by then and I was some cold, teeth chattering in time to the typewriter keys. I had not a cent for rent—just lost my job at the diner on account of Rufus keeping me out late one night too many. Seventeen but felt a hundred, tired of my lonesome road. When I closed my eyes all I saw were his, looking into the depths of me. I wanted that job more than I’d about ever wanted anything: like life depended on it.

Never would remember a word I typed, just how I gritted my teeth to still their clatter. Exactly at the point I typed the word now, I heard him say, Get the girl a wrap. The wife showed up with a cold biscuit and a blanket she laid across my shoulders. Couldn’t open my mouth by then, not even to say thank you—just sat back and closed my eyes. She took the typed pages and left.

Waiting, I got warm. Their soft voices, loud enough to hear but not to understand, carried me on the stream of their murmuring.

~~~

How had I got myself into this fix? Running for my life, that’s how.

Inside my closed eyes appeared the face of my mama I’d crept off from in the dark of night, stealing myself, her one salvation, away. I shook my head, trying to banish her.

But she was insistent, my mama: Vonda Lucile Bryan, who married Clyde Gallivant when she was too young to know better and too in love to care and who then had me, some six months after they tied the knot—which counting of between-time was the kind of thing to mark a person forever in Red Hill, South Carolina.

Long as I could remember, I’d heard her wailing behind one closed door or another. Or worse, she’d take one of those awful laughing fits that lit on her like an affliction. After Daddy left for good, it was just me and that craziness of hers. Sometimes I’d have to wedge a chair against my bedroom door and climb out the window to get to school without having to bump up against her.

I remember looking up one of those mornings, one leg out the window and the other fixing to follow, to see old Miss Dockett next door, staring from her side yard, mouth gaped. Soon as our eyes met she bent her head towards the ground, like something down there needed tending. My head filled with red. When I had both feet on the ground I hollered, “Morning, Miss Dockett!,” but she just stayed bent over her tulips. Heading down the road to school, I could hear her thinking, whispered clear as if it was inside my head: That’s a bad business, that one. And I reckoned not to make a liar of her. Practice sessions, those window escapes.

Black as pitch the night I finally left her, climbed out that window to make my way in the world. So dark I couldn’t see one foot in front of the next. But I could see my mama’s face, couldn’t I?—burned into my brain. And did she maybe, in her pitch-black room, ache at the sound of my leaving? Don’t know; never will.

All I know’s this: That night, in the year I turned sixteen, I slipped slick as a snake through my bedroom window, leaving my mama alone to sleep the sleep of the lost.

Part walked and part begged rides from men who smelled of farm dirt and cigarettes, who leaned towards me in the front seat of their trucks and asked what was a sweet young lady like myself doing on the road in the middle of the night. Getting out, I mumbled, pressing my back hard against the door. By the time I stumbled into Charleston, I had twenty bucks to my name and no idea where to land.

My feet found their way to the nearest Baptist church, which was fancy enough to make me turn tail and head back to the street. But the preacher was too quick for me; he stepped in my way, said for me to come sit down, brought me lemonade.

“How old are you, child?” he asked kindly.

“Nineteen,” I lied, not even blinking. The preacher stared at me.

“Have you run away from home, then?”

Didn’t answer, just looked up at a pale cross, framed by stained glass.

“Are you in trouble, my dear?”

That was an easy one: I nodded.

An hour later I was signed in at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers—that’s what trouble meant to that preacher. The very next morning those ladies set to teaching me a trade: how to take dictation and type like a real office girl. Folks there marveled at me; I was a natural, they said. By the time my belly’d stayed too flat too long to qualify me for free room and board, I’d gotten really good at it.

After the people at the Home kicked me out, I latched on to the first job I could find, washing dishes at Morrison’s Cafeteria. Rented a room from the mama of my former Crittenton roommate Maddy Robison, who’d had her baby and given it up some months earlier. Spent my first paycheck on a few outfits from a thrift shop and set about being a grown woman, taking care of herself. So I thought.

Maddy was a wild girl. She knew all the places that served up hooch, where the swells would be. They’d look us over and creep closer: “You ladies like a little something to sweeten your sodas?” Grins flashing. And then we’d dance. I loved that: The music got inside my skin, my mind set itself to one side, and my body did just what it liked, which was to move.

Later, we’d sit with those boys in booths where knees brushed light under tables, where a hand would come creeping—every time, you could bank on it—careful, careful, testing how far up a thigh it could travel before bat!, and then drawn back, only to start the slow creep again.

“Wanna go for a ride, girls?” That always came next, like clockwork, a dance we all knew the steps to. The ride to someplace dark, the breathing and groaning, from back seat or front. * So far and no further was my rule, no matter how much liquor warmed my belly or dancing stirred my blood. Why, I don’t know. Except sometimes I pictured my mama perched on my shoulder exactly when I had to decide: let him or no? Wild-eyed and crazy-looking, she’d holler No! smack into my ear. If they kept on groping, I’d scream for Maddy and she’d tell them I wasn’t but 15 years old, which got us a quick trip back to the bar.

When Maddy turned up p.g. again, her mama threw us out. I lost my job, Maddy went to live with one of her “friends,” and I hit the road again. Spent time in Greenville, Columbia, Myrtle Beach, then caught a bus back to Charleston when I heard about a textile factory looking to hire clerical help. That didn’t pan out, but I got a job waitressing at Smiley’s Diner, where I wore a folded paper cap and fought off Smiley in the kitchen while Mrs. Smiley sat narrow-eyed and silent at the corner table, near enough to the door to discourage welshers.

That’s where I met up with Rufus Ridenhour, who came in one day for coffee, smiling easy and resting his eyes on my hips, my bosoms, my crackly red hair. Came back the next day, and the next; sipped and looked. One evening around closing time, he stopped at the table I was clearing. He leaned over but I just kept wiping up, humming a little under my breath.

“Nice song,” he said. “What is it?”

I held my head down but he kept hovering, so I said, “Why in the world you want to know that?”

“Well,” he said, “tell the truth, I don’t, really. Just wondering what time you get off. Thought maybe I’d stick around.”

“Oh!,” I said, straightening and looking him in the eye. Handsome and cocky, with some money in his pocket, I reckoned—kind of a swell. Something about him made me feel nervous and reckless at the same time.

“Well,” I said, fetching up my widest smile, “asking’s free!”

He looked surprised, but left a tip big enough to cover two suppers, plus some. I waited for him to come back, never a question in my mind he would.

~~~

“Luce?”

Heard his voice and opened my eyes to see Rufus himself, kneeling in front of me and grinning ear- to-ear. “Wake up, girl, and hear the news!”

I closed my eyes again, head spinning. And now came a touch on my shoulder, so soft it didn’t jar me. “She’s at peace now, Lucile; no need to fret longer.” It was the prophet’s voice. “I have seen her and she sends word: She’s at peace, and she forgives you.”

Slow as swimming up from deepest waters, I opened my eyes again. Instead of Rufus, it was Mr. Forsythe met me coming back, gaze intent on my face. At his side stood his wife, face shining with kindness.

At peace—she forgives? “How could you—?” But my smart-alecky mouth couldn’t find the words I needed. I felt bare naked, afraid. I looked from his calm face to her radiance.

“This is the work we do, Lucile.” She spoke softly. “You will come to understand.”

When Will asked could I follow their path, give self over to the work at hand, I hardly had to speak: He knew.

They hired me on the spot. Eight dollars a week plus room and board, duties to include secretarial, light housekeeping, and occasional cooking.

Cooking? Stared needles at Rufus when Mrs. Forsythe mentioned that, but he only grinned and looked up at the ceiling. Just like that it was decided: Rufus would help fetch my things and bring me back that very afternoon.

I was dizzy with all that had happened; it seemed too big to contain. First thing out of my mouth when we got in the car was the only question I could manage. “Cooking? Really, Rufus? By that I reckon you’re thinking of burnt toast—my specialty?”

He grinned. “You’ll learn, girlie.”

He helped me pack up. I’d never before let him into my room at the boarding house—against the rules—and it shamed me for him see how little I had. But he didn’t remark it, just plunked me down at their door with the lightest of kisses and left, voice vanishing as he went: “Good luck, Lucie-Lu!”

I stood before that door for a second time, thinking about hitting the road again. But to where, to what? I knocked, too quiet maybe, for anybody to hear. But the door opened at once, and there she was, as if she’d been waiting all that time, just for me.

“Welcome, dear,” she said.

Behind her stood the boy, almost as tall as me. “Lucile, meet our son, Ezekiel!” She turned to him. “Miss Gallivant will be joining us in the work, son.”

Surprise showed on his face. He didn’t say a word, just turned on his heel for the hall. The door slammed. Uh-oh, I thought.

His mother led me back to the typewriter room, with its small bed and desk. “Sorry for Ezekiel’s rudeness, dear,” she said, patting my hand. “He’ll warm up to you.”

As in a daze—how had I landed here?—I unpacked my few things. Who were these people, this Will and Rose—she’d told me right off to call them by their given names. “We’re all on the same plane, my dear, don’t you see?” I did not. “Supper will be ready soon. I’ll let you settle in.”

The first question Will asked at supper that night was a doozy: “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your savior, Lucile Gallivant?” I ducked my head and shoveled in a mouthful of black-eyed peas or mashed potatoes, or maybe both—plumb starved for a decent meal. Chewing gave me time to consider.

Did I accept? Well, I’d gone to church some as a child, back when my mama and daddy were still together. Far as saviors went, I’d had me a handful of disappointments. But I surely did know which side of the bread this butter would be spread on. Keeping my eyes fixed on my plate, I nodded.

“Good!” Will beamed like I was his star pupil. He patted my hand, which I turned open-palmed to his. Releasing it like a hot poker, he cleared his throat.

“We have found, Rose and myself,” he said, “that the Lord works in mysterious ways, His wonders to unfold.” My faith might come up against some strong testing, he told me. “Me and Rose have wrestled mightily to connect some new ideas with what we know to be gospel. You’ll be asked to do the same.”

He stopped talking, cocked his head to one side. “Ever hear of a thing called reincarnation, Lucile?”

I hadn’t. But I set my mind to work on the word, trying to conjure an answer smart enough to pass, and finally took a stab: “Something to do with flowers?”

Across the table, their boy hooted. I looked up, surprised to find a grin.

His mama gave him a warning look. “It’s to do with life, Lucile,” she said, taking pity on my ignorance. “Life after death, that is, time and again. And also with our souls, which search through many planes on this earth to find their true destinies.”

Couldn’t quite get my mind around that, so instead I went back to tending to the next forkful of food. How much trouble could I get in, I thought, if I kept my mouth so full I could only nod?

Will dived back in, explaining how the soul was a neverending force and God had a memory long as eternity. “We come into one plane, have our chance at the right path, go out, and come into the next. We swim in an everlasting river, see? Until we get it right.”

Swimming in an everlasting river? Head swimming for sure, I chewed and nodded, aiming for a thoughtful face to present.

The first Christians had known about reincarnation, he said. It had been part of their religion; but somewhere down the line people had suppressed the news. He quoted Scripture to make his case: “Unless man is reborn again, he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

He paused: “What do you think that means?”

Mid-chew, I didn’t look up. I could feel the three of them leaning towards me—even the boy. I had no right words: I would be cast out.

Will leaned forward, his warmth passing into my whole self as he said, quiet and serious: “It’s one of the reasons I’ve been put on this plane, see?—to uncover what’s been covered so long. Been here before, and failed before. But this time will be different.” He leaned back.

I kept uncovering the pattern on my dinner plate at a steady pace. Sooner or later, though, I knew I’d have to answer to something; I could feel his eyes drilling into me. And here it came.

“Tell me this, Lucile Gallivant,” he said. “Have you ever met somebody for the first time and had a powerful feeling you’d known them before?”

Couldn’t avoid looking up then, could I? Cheeks chipmunked, I fixed my eyes first across the table to meet Ezekiel’s 15-year-old boy smirk; then to Rose, who stared back like too much hung on whatever I might answer; and finally to Will. I remembered how my knees had buckled earlier; how his gaze had gone through me, the touch of his hand on my shoulder; his words to me; my open palm. I felt down to my toes how terribly I wanted to be there, at that table, with them—with him. More than anything.

Didn’t hesitate longer, just swallowed and spoke. “Yessir, Mr. Will, Miss Rose, Ezekiel.” I bobbed my head from one to the other, as if marking some before-meetings. “I have done that; I surely have.”

That night as I lay on the sweet-smelling sheets of my narrow bed, I thought about my mama; how Will had said she was at peace, how I hoped it was so. I wondered if we two might have another stab at new beginnings sometime, with maybe a chance to do better by each other. Wouldn’t that be something like a miracle?

That notion got me pondering these strange folks I seemed to have hitched my wagon to. Had we known each other before? Where had they been? Where had I?