He slipped the brittle paper in his pocket and walked to work. Strands of mist haloed the hills that circled the town. The jailhouse door was unlocked, and Goins hoped the cell would be empty.
Inside, Gipson sat silently on his bunk, making a cigarette. Goins gave him a cup of coffee. The cigarette hung from Gipson’s mouth. Once lit, he never touched it.
“Sleep good?” Goins said.
“My back hurts like a toothache.”
Goins unfolded the newspaper article and handed it through the bars. Gipson read it slowly.
“Don’t mean nothing,” he said. “They’re just fighting over who come to America first. Damn sure wasn’t you and me.”
“I kindly favor that lost tribe of Israel idea.”
“You do.”
“I’ve give thought to it. Them people then moved around more than a cat. Your name’s off Hezekiah and mine’s Ephraim. I knowed a Nimrod once. Got a cousin Zephaniah married a Ruth.”
Gipson shook his head rapidly, sending a trail of ash to the grimy floor.
“That don’t make us nobody special,” he said.
“We’re somebody, ain’t we.”
“We damn sure ain’t Phoenicians or Welshes. We ain’t even Melungeons except in the paper. It don’t matter where we upped from. It’s who we are now that matters.”
“Man can study on it if he’s a mind to.”
“You’re a Goins.”
“I’m a deputy.”
Goins returned to his desk. He wanted to ask for the article back but decided to wait until the man wasn’t twitchy as a spooked horse. A preacher had donated a Bible for the prisoners and Goins hunted through Genesis for his namesake, the leader of a lost tribe who never made it to the land of milk and honey. He hoped it was hilly. He turned to Exodus and thought of Abe, his army buddy from New York. Goins wondered if he had a phone. Maybe Abe knew where the lost tribes went.
The jail’s front door slowly creaked open and a woman’s form eclipsed the light that flowed around her. She stepped inside. Goins didn’t know her, but he knew her. It was as if the mountain itself had entered the tiny room, filling it with earth and rain, the steady wind along the ridge. She gazed at him, one eye dark, the other yellow-flecked. Between the lines of her face ran many smaller lines like rain gulleys running to creeks. She’d been old when he was young.
“You look a Goins,” she said.
He nodded. He could smell the mountain on her.
“They a Gipson here?” she said.
Goins nodded again. He swallowed in order to speak, but couldn’t.
The woman shifted her shoulders to remove a game bag. Inside was a blackened pot, the lid fastened with moonseed vine. She looked at him, waiting. He opened a drawer for a plate and she removed the lid to reveal a skin of grease that covered a stew. She scooped a squirrel leg onto his plate, then a potato. The musk of fresh game pushed into the room. Her hands were misshapen from arthritis but she used them freely, her lips clamped tight. Goins understood that she was following the old code of proving the pot contained no file or pistol. He relaxed some. She wasn’t here for trouble.
The woman shifted her head to look at him. The blink of her eyes was slow and patient. She stood as if she could wait a month without speech or movement, oblivious to time and weather. Goins tried again to speak. He wanted to ask her where they’d all come from, but knew from looking at her that she wouldn’t know or care.
When he realized what she was waiting for, he opened his pocketknife, sliced some meat from the leg, and lifted it to his mouth. It tasted of wild onion and the dark flavor of game. He nodded to her. She straightened her back and faced the hall and did not look at him again.
She walked to the cells, moving stiffly, favoring her left side as if straining with gout. The long coat rustled against her legs like brush in a breeze. Goins pivoted in his chair to give them privacy. He looked at the strip of light below the front door, knowing that as the sun passed by, the light would get longer, then shorter, before he could leave. Outside, someone laughed while entering the courthouse. A car engine drowned the sound of morning birds. Goins stared at the closed door. He swallowed the bite of meat.
Behind him he heard the woman say one word soaked in the fury of half a century. Then came the tremendous bellow of a shotgun. The sound bounced off the stone walls and up the hall to his office, echoing back and forth, until it faded. Goins jerked upright in the chair. His legs began to shiver. He held his thighs tightly and the shivering traveled up his arms until his entire body shook. He pressed his forehead against the desk. When the trembling passed, he went down the hall to the cells.
Gun smoke stung his eyes and he could smell cordite. The left side of the woman’s coat was hiked across her hip where she’d hidden the gun. Its barrel was shiny and ragged at the sawcut. Her legs were steady. She tossed the weapon into the cell, looked at Goins and nodded once, her expression the same as before.
The cigarette in Gipson’s cell still trailed smoke. Blood covered the newspaper article and flowed slowly across the floor. The woman stepped to the next cell and waited while he unlocked the door. Her face seemed softer. She stepped inside. When the door clanked shut, her back stiffened, and she lifted her head to the gridded square of sky visible through the small window.
People were running outside. Someone shouted his name, asking if he was hurt. Goins used the phone to call an undertaker who doubled as county coroner. It occurred to him that coroner was a better job than jailer. The coroner would receive twenty-five dollars for pronouncing the man dead, but Goins got nothing extra for cleaning the cell.
He put the Bible away and found the prisoner’s log and wrote Mullins. Under yesterday’s date he wrote Gipson. Goins rubbed his eyes. He didn’t write Haze because the man was down to a body now, and the body was a Melungeon. Goins covered his face with his hands. It was true for him as well.
He opened the door and stepped into the sun. People ducked for cover until they recognized him. He looked at them, men and women he’d known for thirty years, but never really knew. Beyond them stood the hills that hemmed the town. He began walking east, toward the nearest slope. There was nothing he needed to take. The sun was warm against his face.
Moscow, Idaho
Tilden stopped digging and wiped his sleeve across his forehead, leaving a brown smear on his skin. The afternoon sunlight shimmered in the air. He jabbed the shovel into the ground. His arms were sore and his back hurt, but anything was better than prison, even moving graves in Idaho.
The cemetery sat on a rise outside of town, surrounded by wheat fields that were ready for harvest. The grain rose high and golden, swaying in the wind. Next spring the state was building a highway through the cemetery. Tilden and a fellow ex-con named Baker had spent the last few weeks unearthing coffins. They’d been hired to replace a mini backhoe that damaged the caskets, sometimes cutting them in half. A separate work crew hauled the coffins to the other side of Moscow for reburial.
September still had some hard heat and the two men moved to the lacy shade of a tamarack. Sweat evaporated from their skin. Baker reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette without removing the pack. Tilden recognized the prison habit and wondered what traits he still carried.