Freshwater Road (49 page)

Mr. Landau took the lead and opened the door marked Registrar of
Voters, held it for the rest, Reverend Singleton coming in last. They were in
and it was just as he'd described back at the church mock-up. A long dark
wooden counter, waxed and old. Windows across the back wall that would
look over the entrance to the building. Mr. Heywood must've seen them
coming up that walkway on the first day and every day. To the side, another
door with Mr. Heywood's name in gold letters. Three white women at desks
with small table fans fluttering, acting as if no one had entered the office.

They stood there, the six of them. Celeste waited to hear, "May I help
you?" She heard nothing but the slight flip of paper caught in the breezes of
the fans. Ledger books on the counter, pens, a small chrome press bell, and
hard chairs along the wall for waiting. A large painting of a Confederate
soldier full of board-back pride, medals on his chest. And always, a large
Confederate flag on full display.

Reverend Singleton and Celeste stepped to the counter just as they'd
rehearsed at the church. He coughed. "We're here to register to vote."

Sister Mobley, Geneva Owens, Mr. Landau, and Dolly huddled over to
the side out of the way of the door, which might blast open at any moment,
full of badges and billy clubs. Celeste's knees turned to rubber; she felt she
might drop down, crawl under something to get out of the way of whatever
came in that door. She steadied herself by gripping the edge of the counter.
It had the polished sheen of Shuck's bar.

Finally, one of the white women walked to the counter, her Peter Pan
collared blouse buttoned nearly up to her neck, a gold chain and cross shining at her throat. Her raven hair was combed as neat as Momma Bessie's
backyard grass, not a hair out of place, as if it had been roller-set, air-dried,
and saved under glass. She didn't say a word, just glared at them as if they
were beasts behind the bars of a zoo, then shoved a few stapled papers
toward Reverend Singleton, her small wedding diamond and ring glimmering up from her peachy nails. She walked back to her desk, her pump
heels clacking on the oak floor. One application. Sister Mobley took it as a
victory and breathed out a "Thank you, Jesus."

Reverend Singleton and Celeste stood at the counter studying the voter
registration test, which included five pages of multiple-choice questions
on the Mississippi State Constitution and a page of requests for personal
information about the applicant-specifically, whether you knew if your
antecedents had voted before the Civil War, and whether or not they paid
taxes. There was no way to tell if the next person would receive entirely
different questions or not. The Jackson office had sent copies of the different applications given to Negro and white people. They'd prepared for the
worst-that's what the whole summer had been about. Celeste had her best
readers, her best test-takers in this first group. If they couldn't get past this
application, no one else she'd worked with over the summer would.

Mrs. Owens stepped to the counter, severity and age intermingling on
her face, her gray hair bundled back and sweat glistening her forehead. "I
would like to registe' to vote, too."

That really launched it. Mr. Landau, Sister Mobley, and Dolly each
stepped to the counter and repeated what Mrs. Owens had said. A second
white woman, tan and healthy, came forward and delicately slid five more
applications across the counter. She wore a jacketed sundress, pearls around
her neck, and a slender gold wristwatch. "Y'all go ahead and fill those out.
If you can write." Nothing mean in her tone, though. She pursed her lips
and went to the desk of the first woman. The two turned their backs to the
counter, whispering. The dark-haired woman pushed a button on her phone
and spoke quietly. Celeste strained to hear what the woman was saying, but
the other woman spoke over her.

"Take turns with those pens. That's all there are. Take your time." She
had a curly smile on her lips. "When you done with that, Mr. Heywood
might want to ask you some questions."

Celeste wondered if she'd called Sheriff Trotter. Surely he knew they
were in the building. Something must be going on, and she needed to figure
it out fast. They'd fill out those applications, answer all those questions, and
then they'd have to wait and wait to find out the results. No law about that,
just history. No games left short of the endgame.

The third white woman, younger, stared openly at them. Celeste caught
her eye and saw there was no hatred in her look, only surprise and confusion. Was it surprise that they'd even shown up after the burning of the
church, or just surprise that she was a witness to history? She didn't come to
the counter, but her eyes went back and forth from Celeste and the group
to her desktop, then to the tall windows and the broad blue August sky
beyond them.

Time pushed the sun to the afternoon side of the building as they stood
at the counter filling out those registration tests. Clouds gathered in surplus
then thinned out, and the sun beamed clear and hot again. For all of them
to complete their forms took more than three hours. Celeste knew they
wouldn't be registered today. Reverend Singleton gathered the tests in a pile,
pushing the extra one to the side. "We're done. May I ask how long the wait
will be before they're processed?"

"I can't answer that." It was the hostile dark-haired woman who spoke.
"Like I said, Mr. Heywood might ask y'all some questions, too."

"Fine. We'll wait here." Reverend Singleton turned to the group. He
showed Mrs. Owens and Sister Mobley to the waiting chairs and physically
sat them down. They'd finished their applications and gone to hovering
around the door, looking anxious to leave. Mr. Landau, Dolly, and Celeste
stood with Reverend Singleton.

"Ain't you wanting to register?" The younger woman spoke directly to
Celeste.

The world went silent. The two older white women's heads whipped
around to her.

Celeste was stunned that she'd even asked her such a sensible and polite
question. She fumbled for words.

"No, I'll have to vote at home." Celeste spoke curling her upper lip to
cover that cracked tooth, sounding like a crone. In truth, she hadn't yet
registered, and wouldn't be able to for another year.

"You sure?" The young woman bit her lip, tried to suck moisture out of
her frightened mouth. The dark-haired woman glared at her.

"Thank you. I'm sure. Thank you." Celeste wanted to smile but knew
that would only get the girl in more trouble than she was in already.

The other women encircled the younger woman's desk, kept their voices
down, but there was no mistaking the anger and hissing in the air.

The Negro people waited.

"I read in the newsletter from Jackson there're some white builders
from California going around helping rebuild some of these burned down
churches." Reverend Singleton spoke calmly to the group as if they sat in a
coffee shop mulling over the morning papers. "They're up in Mileston right
now. The community center there got torched."

Celeste had read it. She knew that same little article had also said that
the structures being rebuilt were being guarded by Negro men with shotguns night and day. "They're guarding that place now. Twenty-four hours a
day. Men with guns sitting out there guarding the workers and the building
while it's being built." When Celeste said "men with guns" she lifted her
chin and made sure the women behind the counter heard every word.

Dolly looked at her, then at the secretaries. "Well, I heard that. It's about
damn time." She snapped her head back around to the women behind
the counter, looked down her freckly nose at them, then walked closer to
Sister Mobley and stood by her like an attendant. Celeste wondered what
was going on in that mind: Dolly Johnson coming into herself like a wild
person. Trouble ahead.

Mr. Landau grunted. Sister Mobley let out a deep sigh and opened her
Bible. Any talk of guns sent her to scripture. Mrs. Owens didn't flinch.

The suntanned woman stood. "We gon have to close now. Y'all have to
come back tomorrow. Or whatever."

The three secretaries, the younger one lagging, gathered their purses
from desk drawers, freshened their lipsticks, and stood waiting for the
group to vacate the office. They walked out not knowing when, or if, their
applications would be processed.

Reverend Singleton ferried Dolly and Mr. Landau to their cars at the
church clearing, then dropped Sister Mobley and Mrs. Owens on Freshwater Road before taking Celeste to the place where Sissy's body had been
found. He drove a mile or so on the two-lane, then turned southeast onto
another blacktop bordered by a high ridge of rust-orange dirt with thickets
of saplings surrounded by tall stands of long-needled pine. If you didn't
know the turn-off, you'd drive right by. Then he turned again onto a sandy dirt and gravel road. Celeste raised her window nearly all the way against
the clouds of dust. Reverend Singleton aimed his car into pressed tire tracks
that smoothed their passage until they hit a few deep ruts.

"How long do you think they'll make us wait?" Celeste's mind rattled
over all the waiting that Negro people had been doing since the end of the
Civil War.

"No telling." Reverend Singleton wagged his head in short swipes as if
to say only God knew.

They rumbled along, the landscape morphing from pine forest to near
desert and back again. A faint pine scent floated on the air. This was indeed
a very long way for Sissy to have run, even with her strong young legs.

"You never talk about home." Celeste licked her tongue across her cracked
tooth, panting from dust and heat.

He loosened his tie again and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt,
keeping his eyes on the sand and gravel road. "I was born right across the
Pearl River just outside Bogalusa. My people left the south years ago."

"Why'd you come back?" The car felt like the anteroom to a furnace
with the windows closed. Celeste cranked her window down again and let
the dust float in. A hand-painted sign nailed to a tree announced Cataboula
Creek. Reverend Singleton turned into a car path that had lost most of its
gravel and in a few yards pulled up to a mound of dirt and sand the color
of old oranges.

"Well, you can't run forever. What goes on here, goes on everywhere.
It's a matter of degree. You came down here." He grinned, but his eyes had
a spark of nostalgia, a longing.

"For a summer, Reverend." She smiled back, her cut lip still tight. "Just
for a summer."

"Praise the Lord." He took the key out of the ignition, nodded her out
of the car.

Celeste liked him praising the Lord for her sojourn.

The heat lay across southern Mississippi like the grease in a cast-iron
skillet over a high flame. A rush of chattering birds lifted up from the thinboned trees. The place smelled of rotting earth, of dead leaves and worms. It
was as if a primeval forest and a sandy plain had overlapped unintentionally
and now fought each other for dominance. Rough country.

"Even bamboo grows in here." He walked along, rolling up his shirt
sleeves. "There's poplars, black willow, wax myrtle, swamp oak."

Celeste walked at his side until the thickness of the growth narrowed
the path, and then she fell in behind him. In a quiet marred only by their
padding, crunching footsteps, she heard the gurgling of water. Then Reverend Singleton stopped. It was groundwater swelling out of a rocky pile
like a faucet someone forgot to turn off. They stood on the slipping edge of
a wide streambed where tree roots grabbed out, naked.

"Where you'd learn so much about trees?" She remembered how he'd
also named the trees on the ride to Sophie Lewis's house. She spoke low as
if someone else might be there watching them, marking them. She stepped
closer to him.

"Always wanted to work with plants. You know. When you get to college, you think you'll have time to study everything. But, of course, you
don't. You get about the business of designing a life for yourself. The ministry was always number one. The trees came in second and third." He loped
along the creek bank like a guide following a trail. "This is where the creek
begins. It runs south to Lake Borgne." Sweat drenched his shirt collar and
spotted the cloth across his back. The stream strengthened by degrees, other
tiny rivulets joining the original one until a robust flow got going.

"There's no oxygen in here." Celeste stopped to catch her breath, the
sweat running down her body as fast as the water in the creek. The density
of trees held the sun at a distance, but whatever was gained in coolness got
lost in humidity.

"Not much." He walked a few steps from the edge of the creek, which
swelled and developed a wavy current, crystal clear with an orange sand
bottom. After a while, he stopped. "This is where we found her. I marked
the place by this yellow poplar." He pointed to a dark-barked tree with
leaves that looked like squares. Celeste followed the straight-arrow trunk
up to a break that showed a piece of blue sky. The tree had small cone-like
growths on the branches.

"You oughta see the flowers. Like big tulips." He leaned back against the
tree and wiped his sweaty face with his handkerchief. "The flowers come in
the spring. The leaves will turn yellow in the fall."

"I remember from that ride down to see Sophie Lewis. You pointed
it out, but it had started raining." She kneeled down in the soft dirt, eyes
searching the area, wondering what message had been rained away, slipped
down the current all the way to the Gulf. She sat back on her heels looking
at the moving water, the perpetual scale of dried salt on her body feeling like a horror of insects creeping over her skin. She scratched and slapped at
bugs that weren't even there.

"When it rains, you know, this stream gets going." Reverend Singleton
joined her by the bank. "There's run-off from higher ground."