Solemn (24 page)

The Magnolia State and its timber-hushed lands were nowhere near as fussy as their mystique led on. The terrain was friendly, amidst cypress swamps with no tides and packets of thicket in black holes on any map, and exceptional woods. It made up for the haunting antebellum homes and quite courageous Confederate flag posters. Short of randomly digging holes in the ground through it or tracing every single hole in the wall where no one blanketed anonymity for too long, Justin Bolden was at a loss of answers to truly condole himelf, let alone the Weathers. As with very few before. And all, no matter their age, were children. Pearletta's mother called him. So he answered. It went this way sometimes, he was learning: blasts from the past, unlikely friendships, a constellation of names, sedimentation to knights in closed position for life. Thank God he had stayed near his parents, his daughter. How many more could there have been, here and there, farther away, and up or down, to the cities? Even now, as he knocked on forty's door, the brain picking and names and all of it clicked his clock into worry about dementia, enough to speed it up. Now, he stood in a stranger's living room in a circle of prayer before talk.

When she had called him this time it was really for the company and no news. For, two years later of little sleep and strident crying spells and emergency room doctors coming up with little but heartbreak, Viola Weathers sat down. They were going to move. Like most victims would, if only they could. Mr. Bolden must come to say good-bye.

“Pearly played the violin in school for me. I started viola when I was five. I was named to go to conservatory, but, well, I met Father. No regrets. Pearly liked to read on the porch. It's why Father put in that swing. She brought the baby up here a few times. Oh, the baby just loved that swing. Thank God she left that nigger home. Heathen, he was. And, you know, kids won't come round you when they're on the crooked and broad. But anyway. That sofa chair you sitting in there? I caught her playing with herself in it one night, watching this late mess on cable. TV's gonna be the death of us. I keep it off. Now, that picture there we took on break to the north, Kansas City. Father's people there. Say they got miles of new white houses on long drives. Black folks in 'em, too. And, still warm. Snow even, but warm. Oh, Pearly liked that cup. She liked the little blue lattice on the edges, gold on the rim. Pearly loved anything at all complicated. The handle ain't as round as it seems though. Nope. Little more creative. Little ridges on the inside if you wanna scratch your finger or readjust without setting down the cup. Nice shape. Like Pearly's … So, Mr. Bolden, you want some fried green tomatoes and pot liquor?”

“Well, um. Sure.”

“Come with me.”

She walked Bolden to the kitchen in back through two halls of what she called her “manor,” sliding her fingers along the lid of an upright piano and straightening shoulder-brushed wooden picture frames. Pearletta would show again one day, like a cat shot off in heat rushed back to have the litter. Itinerant—so all the more capable of exhaustion, hunger, and destitution. They'd take her back any way she came. They would leave a forwarding address with the neighbors and one of the new young tellers still at the bank Mr. Weathers left. He couldn't add or subtract well since Pearletta's disappearance. Viola never mentioned her other boy and girl, just holes in a doughnut they were now. The stricken siblings had first escorted Bolden through Pearletta's third-floor back bedroom, since Viola couldn't make it up the stairs in her non-public condition. A shame, the bedroom was. Department store perfume and makeup hoarded in such telling piles as to adjourn the concept of brand. A has-been's overstuffed and tantrum-battered closet. School projects and notebooks and college textbooks crying for help from sunken shelves. The dresser top was greasy; the mirror was smudged and flecked with nail polish. Shame. He could tell it cost good money. Like with any girl, the off-tune music boxes and tangles of common jewelry remained, stuffed animals in astonished poses in the corners. Magazine covers taped to the walls. Posters; Pearletta once adored Britney Spears and U2. Condoms and a league of the one shoe missing spread under her bulky queen bed. Yet the sheets stayed stretched, undefamable, and white. Pearletta had always known it was there, perhaps, for little to nothing to do, to just climb on in it at time to use her key again there.

Viola had allowed him and him alone—“the black fella”—trust to pinpoint defamations. Him and only him. Just tell her, first, what fault he found. Now, Viola said, room was cleaned 'cause she had a little grandson who grew to like it, for the view of the backyard swing set and sound of the bird feeders, woodpeckers and mourning doves drawn. Bolden could see the room's windows, heavy white drapes starched and panes down, when he stood in the former root-vegetable garden now entombed by disdain.

“All things change, as you know,” Viola explained. She was thinner. Her lessened dreadlocks swung back inside, for her to cook and serve her husband first, drowsy in his La-Z-Boy. Then, she would get the good policeman's plate ready. Out back in the gazebo, Bolden slipped back the mosquito net and made himself comfortable in a wrought-iron chair at a matching table teetered out of balance. A monarch let itself in.

Out of the sun, away from the station and his precinct grounds and with perspective to go along with the Buick, Bolden noticed different things from time to time.
There is a breeze. Shade is the noblest mercy. The sky ain't always blue. Leaves ain't all the same. Ants are quite the characters.
Day or night, the wildlife camouflage among it all, to guard the living from the reproach of dead silence. He saw a squirrel round off for what may, even lower critters cut through grass and silt loam. The swing set and slide were scratched and scraped from good use. Pearletta had to be dead. So long as a door to a home like the Weathers' was open and a four-poster bed overlooked a swing set stayed set, even the most committed junkie would have sulked home by now. Mr. Weathers' fishing poles drooped and his bait pails tipped against a wood chalet shed, the door cracked with the ins-and-outs of inventorying life, prepping to relocate a lifetime. Its witty, sand-dusted mementos stacked atop shelves and tables and racks Bolden wanted to get to know. With Viola scatterbrained inside, and Bolden too polite to rush her, he went alone.

A crow faceup and wings spread lay at the edge of it. Probably warm. Bolden nudged it with side of his Doc Marten behind sprouts of maidenhair at side of the shed. Besides tougher signs of the industry a banker was not known for but relished nonetheless—a leaf blower, a push lawn mower, axes and saws—the shed stored the runoff of a family clearly once intact and going places. An ivory crib and rocking horse, practice basketball hoops, three matching ten-speeds, a ruffled and collapsed above-ground pool, an old Easy Bake Oven set, golf clubs, and marked boxes of clothes meant for donation. A construction of antique hard drives, computer screens, scanners, typewriters, and even a floor-model Xerox machine sat covered by painter's plastic. Atop a carpenter's table were paint pans and cans. The mint-green color Viola pointed out seemed to be the only color used from the many there, all mild. If only he had met Pearletta here and not there. If only there had been no Singer's Trailer Park awaiting her … or if Pearletta had waited here, longer, in colors of life and with sound of bird feeders, on porch swings.

Viola tapped Bolden on his neck and he shivered.

“Didn't mean to scare you,” Viola said. “I gotta start on this shed soon.”

“No,” Bolden told her. “A nice one. I'm curious 'bout the size. It hold so much.”

“We had it custom-built,” Viola told him. “Expected more grandkids … Pearly wanted to hog this on up, too.”

“Oh?”

“That girl wanted it all. Before we could crack champagne on the side or cut a ribbon to it she already thought it was hers. It was gonna be her little art studio.”

“I ain't know Pearletta was an artist.”

“She wasn't. Could've been though. It was just excuse to run on off from us and do things in secret and keep folks guessing, like now, I guess.”

“Oh, well, okay.”

“She was impatient with painting. So we bought her the stuff to start that pottery bit, 'fore she went off to Oakwood. Actually used it all, too. Still, when she showed up from time to time these last few years. 'Bout a year after all the mess in that there park.”

“Yes, Singer's,” Bolden said. “There's good people there, despite…”

“Keep dreaming,” Viola said. “The pottery appealed to her nature a bit more than the painting, you know. It was dirtier. Tough to handle. Business, we told her. We was paying. Black child in Mississippi ain't got no business thinking 'bout majoring in no art. Or black child in all America for that matter. But you've done mighty well for yourself, Mr. Bolden. You wanna see some of the stuff she made? It really is pretty.”

Bolden followed Viola to a spacious dugout behind the toys. He saw an electric potter's wheel and stone slab table, unopened bins of clay, and sealed tins of glaze.

“This little pug mill last thing we bought Pearly,” Viola said. “Cost a fortunte nearly. When she lost the baby. Divorced that dopehead we told her not to marry. Cost us another fortune to untangle that braid. But the pug mill was my gift. To cheer her up.”

Bolden looked at the stacks and stacks of clay circles and glazed vases belonged to Pearletta. He moved near them. Viola skipped past him to resituate the dozens of sturdy works, as she really had only been doing in the shed at times she intended to start purging it. There was music behind the labor; depending on the shape and the glaze, a different sound came when any of it touched. Some pieces had broken, in clumsiness and poor judgment more so than incoherence or rage. However, since she had an audience, Viola was much more careful and systematic about her fiddling. This-away and that-away some needed to be, looked better as, matched colors better, sized up closer … the touching of it all and the sounds. Even the dirt it uncovered added to the melody.

“Looka here,” Viola said. From a bowl of knicknacks she pulled a small teal work: a long, thin tube with a hole at one of the ends, a round bowl at the other. The inside of the bowl was fragrant, charred. “Pearletta loved her incense. Too much smoke for me.”

“It's a nice color,” Bolden told her. “May I see it?”

Viola passed the bowl to him and went on back to her task upon a stack of Pearletta's intaglios devoted to nature, rivers, and suns and hilltops with trees. She would keep them, for Pearletta's traveling mural. Had never thought of these, though Father would have to drill in hooks in addition to all else had to be done to get ready. Bolden sniffed the bowl. He smelled the remains of more than a few sessions of weed smoking. That part of what it was used for, probably more, was still apparent in the odor. Bolden noticed the pipe's bowl was not perfectly round. It was indented in the middle, into a heart. And his fingertips sank into imperfections at the side. Or no. Marked, a teeny engraving added after the fact, given how little depth the etching held. With his back to the door where the sun shot through to give Viola even more light, to see she had mixed in a magneta ashtray with the intended purple plate set and this wasn't the way, Bolden made out the message on the side:
Redvine … xo, xo …

It would take him just a few days to recall, out the names and faces creaking up what he used to think was a pretty sharp mind, where he knew the name from. And why.

He wondered just how much more Pearletta sprinkled around for them all, unforgotten, unloaded consciousness, snuck in and quickly tucked out of view. Always running. And, as he watched a woman move about her modest shed in back of what she called her “manor” and walked through as the lord of, he resisted the bite of judgment at the before that could have dismayed this after. There had to have been money to get Pearletta Weathers some help before it came down to Pearletta Hassle. It could have been done quietly. Faraway. Maybe they had tried. For the victims he always had to suspend judgment. He put the weed bowl in his pant pocket, a defamation but at least one with a name on it. Maybe a clue or help down the road, if Pearletta was still walking them.

“We was supposed to eat something, right?” Viola asked him, rearranging still.

Bolden let her know she was right, and so they ate.

 

TWENTY-ONE

Seventy miles down the Trace was a strong, persistent Pearletta flyer, wading in a clogged late-spring drain. And Solemn had chalk between her fingers. In a race with others' apathy and better things to do, Solemn marked up Singer's gate: just Pearletta's name, that's all. Gypsum and limestone attracted her to side of the bank if Bev went, or official buildings like the post office when Bev sent back off to Landon, or park benches and other neat creations of the Arbor Society. Solemn marked the sidewalks in front of the town boutique, jeweler, and a hair shop. Turned so Solemn's face kept blowback from chalk, swirled in the hurry and commitment to spreading Pearletta Hassle's name. One day she sighted a
Have You Seen Pearletta?
sign. Later that night in Singer's, she heard a carry-on between a man and his “bitch” … who would go missing just like Pearletta. Solemn believed this was because of her, making it all up on her own.

Parents watched her hunt and inspect coincidence. Bev, tolerable. Redvine, alert.

The GED forms and papers and folders and Scantron sheets arrived each month from the State, to pile at the kitchen table. Now there was the new computer thingy she explored beyond “Be careful.” Most nights, the DigiCate screen glowed in the dark in her bedroom or on the couch, its battery cord so hot Solemn kept a little fan by it. Too bad Desi wasn't there to mess it up with her. The Longwoods would have bought one. She knew it. But, oh well, television had turned them funny acting. They even left the fruit dangling like Eden, so comfortable folks got they just showed up in daytime with bags and pails …