The day after we found her, May Lynn was boxed up in a cheap coffin and buried on a warm morning in the pauper section of the Marvel Creek Cemetery next to a dried patch of weeds with seed ticks clinging to them, and I suspect some chiggers too small to see. Her mother and brother were buried in the same graveyard, but they hadn’t ended up next to one another. Up the hill was where the people with money lay. Down here was the free dirt, and even if you was kin to someone, you got scattered-you went in anyplace where there was room to dig a hole. I’d heard there was many a grave on top of another, for need of space.
There were oaks and elms to shade the rest of the graveyard, but May Lynn’s section was a hot stretch of dirt with a bunch of washed-down mounds, a few with markers. Some of the markers were little sticks. Names had once been written on them, but they had been washed white by the sun and rain.
The constable ruled on matters by saying she had been killed by a person or persons unknown, which was something I could have figured out for him. He said it was most likely a drifter or drifters who had come upon her by the river. I guess they had been carrying a sewing machine under their arm.
He didn’t make any effort to search out her murderer or find out why she was down there. For that matter, there wasn’t even a doctor or nobody that looked at her to be sure exactly how she was killed or if she had been fooled with. Nobody cared but me and Terry and Jinx.
The service was conducted by a local preacher. He said a few words that might have sounded just as insincere if they had been spoken over the body of a distant cousin’s pet mouse that had died of old age.
When he was through talking, a couple of colored men put the plain box down in the ground using ropes, then started shoveling dirt in the hole. Outside of the colored men, and the preacher and the seed ticks, we had been the only ones at the funeral, if you could call it that.
“You’d think they was just taking out the trash, way that preacher hurried up,” Jinx said, after they left.
“Way they saw it,” I said, “that was exactly what they was doing. Taking out the trash.”
Jinx was my age. She had her hair tied in pigtails that stood out from her head like plaited ropes of wire. She had a sweet face, but her eyes seemed older, like she was someone’s ancient grandma stuffed inside a kid. She wore a dyed blue flour-sack dress that had some of the old print faintly poking through, and she was barefoot. Terry had on some new shoes, and he had gotten from somewhere a man’s black tie. It was tied in a big knot and pulled up tight to his neck, making him look like a bag that had been knotted near the top. He had enough oil in his black hair to grease a truck axle, and it still wasn’t quite enough to hold his wild mane down. His face was dark from the sun, and his blue eyes were shiny as chunks of the sky. None of us was happy with what had happened, but he was taking it especially hard; his eyes were red from crying.
“No one will make a concerted effort to discover what happened to her,” Terry said. “I think a search for the truth is out of the question.”
I loved to hear Terry talk, because he didn’t sound like no one else I knew. He hadn’t dropped out of school like me, as I was having problems with it being so far and no way to get there and I didn’t like it much anyhow. My mother, who was pretty good educated, didn’t like that I had quit, but she didn’t get out of bed to make much of a complaint against it; that might have required her putting on her shoes.
Terry liked school. Even the math part. His mother had been a schoolteacher and gave him extra learning. His father had died when he was young, and as of recent his mother had taken up with and married an oilman named Harold Webber. Terry didn’t get along with him even a little bit. Webber made Terry’s mother quit teaching school to be home with the kids, and then she started a seamstress business, but he made her kill that, too, and toss out all her goods, because he believed a husband took care of his wife and she shouldn’t work, even if she liked the work she did. In the end it was all about the same anyhow, as jobs, especially for women, had become as rare as baptized rattlesnakes.
Since that marriage, Terry had a look in his eyes like a rabbit that was about to run fast and far.
Jinx could read and write and cipher some, same as me, but she hadn’t learned it in school. Coloreds didn’t have a school in our parts, and she had been taught by her daddy, who had gone up north to work for a while and learned to read there. He said it was better in the north for coloreds in some ways because people acted like they liked you, even if they didn’t. But he come back because he missed his family and being in the South, since he knew right off who the sons of bitches was; there wasn’t as much guesswork involved in figuring who was who.
But when times got bad, that didn’t keep him from heading north again. He hated to do it, he told Jinx, and meant it, but he had to go up there and make some money and mail it back to her and her mother.
None of us was happy in East Texas. We all wanted out, but seemed stuck to our spots like rooted trees. When I thought about getting out I couldn’t imagine much beyond the wetlands and the woods. Except for Hollywood. I could imagine that on account of May Lynn talking about it all the time. She made it sound pretty good, even though she had never been there. Still, that’s where I wished to be. But as I had learned from Jinx, shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills up first. She said the same thing about prayer, but I had never taken it on myself to test the notion.
We decided to go to May Lynn’s house and see if her daddy was there so we could let him know the bad news, tell him he missed the funeral. Our guess was if he was home, he would know by now, but it was something to do, and to tell it true, if he wasn’t home, we wanted to take a look around. I can’t explain it, but I guess we didn’t want to let go of May Lynn just yet, and going where she lived seemed a way to keep her memory warm.
With her dead, a lot of hopes I had were gone. I always figured May Lynn just might go off to Hollywood and be a movie star, and then she’d come home and take us back with her. I never could figure why she would do that, or what we might do out there, but it beat thinking I was just gonna grow up and marry some fellow with tobacco in his cheek and whiskey on his breath who would beat me at least once a week and maybe make me keep my hair up.
None of this kind of thinking mattered, though, because May Lynn didn’t become a star. Truth was, as of late, we hadn’t known her very well ourselves. By the time she showed up in the water wired to that Singer sewing machine, I reckon I hadn’t seen her for a month. I figured it was similar for Terry and Jinx.
Jinx said she thought May Lynn had come of the age to think hanging with colored kids might not lead to stardom. Jinx said she didn’t hold it against her, but I had doubts about that. Jinx could hold a grudge.
As to what happened to May Lynn, I had ideas about that. Nobody loved a picture show the way she did, and she’d hitch a ride with anyone if they’d get her into town on Saturdays to catch a show. Men were always quick to pick her up. Me, I’d have had to lay down in the middle of the road and play dead to have them stop, and even then they might have run over me, same as they would a dead possum. Could be May Lynn got a ride with the wrong person; an angry Singer sewing machine salesman. It was a stretch, but I figured it was better detective work than Constable Higgins had done.
To get to May Lynn’s house from our side, you either had to walk ten miles up to the bridge and cross over and walk about ten more on the other side along the edge of the river, or you could cross by boat to the far bank and walk right up to her house. It would save you hours.
We used Daddy’s boat, the one with the little hole in the bottom, and while me and Terry rowed, Jinx used a coffee can to bail the water out. After a while, I took a turn and she rowed.