I pulled in, as I’d been told back at Nathan’s, by a yellowish house on the right, first one I came to after crossing railroad tracks and going through two crossroads. An old woman in a faded sundress scattered grain for chickens at the side of the house. She was oddly colorless, pulpy like wood long left outdoors, collapsing into herself with the years. She looked at me with all the interest a tree stump might display.
“Hello, m’am. Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Alouette.”
Nothing showed on her face. “Not bothering me,” she said. Then she turned and walked away, to a rough shed nailed onto the back of the house at one end, open at the other. I followed a few steps behind. She dumped grain back into a burlap bag and folded the top over. Hung the pail from a nail just above.
“Could you tell me if she’s around?”
“Have to ask what your business with her might be.”
“I promised a friend I’d look her up.”
She grunted. It was more like the creak of a gate than any grunt I’d ever heard. “Name’s Adams. Where you from, boy?”
“New Orleans.”
“Mmm. Thought so.” She looked to see how the chickens were doing. They seemed more interested in pecking one another than the food. “I was up to Memphis once. You been there?”
“Yes m’am, I have.” Memphis was where my father died, though I wasn’t there then.
“You care much for it?”
“Not particularly. It’s like just about any other town you see around here, only a lot bigger.”
She groaned-it couldn’t have been a laugh-and said that was God’s truth. Then she looked at me for a while before saying: “Well then, I guess I know who you must be. That Griffin fellow LaVerne took up with. Don’t much like you, from what I know. Don’t expect me to.”
“You knew LaVerne, then?”
Again that long, affectless regard.
“Mother gen’rally knows her only daughter.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Adams,” I said shortly. “I didn’t know. I had no idea Verne’s parents were still alive.”
“Just the one. But neither did she, boy, that you’d notice. Not that her daddy and I ever wanted things any different, you understand. Vernie had her life down there in New Orleans, and she was welcome to it, but we didn’t want any part of it. Wrote once or twice.”
“LaVerne really turned things around, later on. She helped a lot of other people get their lives together, too. You both could have put all that behind you.”
“Maybe we could have. Maybe not.” She eyed the chickens again, looked up at the sky. Darkness had begun working its way in at day’s edge. “Things had changed here too.”
“So Alouette came here because you’re her grandmother?”
“You have the kind of troubles that girl had, you just naturally go to a woman. From what I know about down there where you-all are, there wasn’t much of anybody she could go to.”
“Her mother was trying to get in touch with her, before she died. That’s why I’m here now.”
“Girl didn’t know that. Didn’t say much about her mother ever: Not that I cared to listen.”
“How did Alouette find you here? Or even know about you, for that matter?”
“Long time ago, right after Vernie had her, I sent that girl a book of stories I came across in the back of a cabinet, something that was Vernie’s when she was little. Thought she might make some use of it. Envelope had the address, and she says her mother cut that out and pasted it in the front of the book. Never sent another thing to that girl. But I ain’t moved, of course. And she still had it.”
“Where’s Alouette now, Mrs. Adams?”
“Couldn’t tell you that, I’m afraid.”
“But she is here? With you?”
Her eyes were as lifeless as locust husks abandoned on a tree. “Stayed here a few days. Then when it looked to be some trouble, I had Mr. Simpson drive that girl over to the Clarksville hospital. I did midwifing back in the old times. You don’t forget what birthing trouble looks like.”
“Did you visit her at the hospital? Did anyone?”
“Haven’t seen her since the day Mr. Simpson came by to get her.”
“Didn’t you wonder how she was doing? Think she might need you?”
“Don’t waste much time worrying and thinking. I figure the girl found me once. If she wants to, she can do it again. She’d be welcome enough.”
“You know about her baby?”
“Mr. Simpson told me it’s still alive.”
“Mrs. Adams, I have to ask you something. Please don’t take this wrong. Was your granddaughter using drugs when she was here?”
She thought for a moment. “Wouldn’t know how to tell you. She wasn’t normal. Laid around half asleep most of the time, didn’t have any appetite. All that could be what was going wrong inside her.”
“You don’t have any idea where she might have gone, then, after leaving the hospital?”
“Didn’t know she left.”
“Well, I’ll be getting on, then. Thank you for giving me so much of your time.”
“Didn’t give it. You helped yourself.”
“You’re right, but thanks all the same. When I find Alouette, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
I started back around the house to the car.
“Boy?”
“Yes, m’am?”
“You be heading over to Clarksville now by any chance?”
“Yes, m’am.”
“Going to see that baby.”
“Yes, m’am. And to ask more questions.”
“You figure you might have room to give an old lady a ride over there? Sounds like that baby’s going to be needing someone.”
“Yes, m’am. It does sound that way. And I’d be glad to take you.”
“You wait right there.”
She went into the house and came immediately back out with a Sunday-best purse, probably the only one she had. It was covered with tiny red, blue and green beads.
“Let’s go, boy,” she said. “Dark’s coming on fast.”
It always is.
Chapter Sixteen
So, midnight, raining, miles to go, I arrived at the berth bearing Baby Girl McTell to whatever ports awaited her.
In the car on the way Mrs. Adams asked me to tell her about Verne’s last years, offering no comment when I was through. We passed the remainder of the trip, just over an hour, in silence, watching the storm build: a certain heaviness at the horizon, rumbles of thunder in unseen bellies of clouds, lightning crouched and stuttering behind the dark pane.
Mrs. Adams had me drop her off on the highway outside town, at a cinderblock church (Zion Redemption Baptist) where, she said, her sister lived, adding “pastor’s wife,” her toneless voice (it seemed to me) implying equally scorn and acknowledgment of status. She would go on to the hospital first thing in the morning.
Closer in, I stopped at one of those gargantuan installations that look like battleships and seem to carry everything from gas and drinks and snacks to novelty T-shirts, athletic shoes and the occasional Thanksgiving turkey. You could probably pick up a TV or computer system at some of these places. I pushed a dollar over the counter toward a teenage girl wearing a truly impressive quantity of denim-shirt, pants, boots, jacket, even earrings-and poured my own coffee from a carafe squatting on the hot plate (One Refill Only, Please) beside display cards of Slim Jims, snuff and lip balm. Then I pulled the car to the edge of the lot and sat there breathing in the coffee’s dark, earthy smell, feeling its heat and steam on my face, sipping at it from time to time. New Orleans coffee makes most others seem generic, but I was at this moment far, far from home, a wanderer, and could make do. Besides, for the true believer coffee’s a lot like what Woody Allen says about sex: the worst he ever had was wonderful.
Back at the hospital years ago, later at AA meetings, coffee would disappear by the gallon, as though it were getting poured down floor drains. These people were serious coffee drinkers. Someone or another was pretty much always at work making a new pot, draining the urn to re-up it, dumping out filters the size of automobile carburetors or measuring out dark-roast-with-chicory by the half pound. Antlike streams of porters to back doors, fifty-pound sacks saddling their shoulders. They should have just pulled up tanker trucks outside, run a hose in.