— Sorry to trouble you again, Miss Vish, he said. -I just wanted to ask one more thing.
She nodded. Eyes cut just for a second to the jar he held in his hand.
— Yes, sir.
— I was asking Dr. Heath about poisons, ways folks might poison someone if they had a mind to do it.
She looked at him, even cocked her head just a fraction of an inch.
— Poisons? she said. Then an odd little movement ticked at the thin licorice twist of her mouth. The old lips opened a hair and something between an enervated laugh and a wheeze came out. -Naw, sir, she said then, don’t truck in no poisons.
— Say you don’t.
— No, sir, and her eyes went back to where they rested on something over his head across the tiny creek in the swampy woods. -No sir, she said again, managing an emphatic little movement of her head, the white straw and scarce hair there looking as if permanently blown and dried hard away from her face like a frost-driven shrub. -Poisons invented by the white folks. Black folks don’t need no poisons.
— Why’s that?
— Well, sir, she said, we got the white folks, poison enough. Then she bared her gums, gave that little wheezy laugh. -I reckon I can say that nowadays, cain’t I.
— I reckon you can say whatever you want to.
She nodded.
— Ain’t always been the case, she said.
Finus held the jar up a tad so the light caught it, seemed to be soaked up by the black gnarl inside it, a tiny black hole into which the fading afternoon light was sucked.
— You got any idea what this thing she was keeping on her shelf might be?
Old woman rocked once, using an old toe as black as the thing in the jar, about as gnarled, and seemed to regard the jar with her opaque eyes.
— I can’t see too good, she said.
— It’s just a mason jar. Got something in it I can’t tell what it is. It was on Creasie’s shelf, in the kitchen.
— Naw, sir, she finally said, drawing out the words. -Look to be some kind of old preserves, to me. Might be some old figs drawed up. Long past eating.
— I’ll bet you’re right on that.
— Might have something to eat inside, you hungry.
— Well, Finus said after a moment, I appreciate that. But I believe I’ll pass. He nodded by way of saying good day, made his way with hobbling old Mike back up the trail toward his truck.
A Lost Paradise
SHE HAD NEVER been naked in public in her life. She had been naked outdoors but not within sight of others aside from her friend Avis. Now it felt naked but not quite the same, though who’s to say since she never went outside naked, not out in the open air with no cover. This was not naked the same way, but she was getting used to it. And she wasn’t anymore like walking, but more like what you call flying in a dream, just sort of moving just ahead of some awareness of the body or of moving itself, an effortless here and there. She had no voice but a sound like a gentle wind rattling dry fall leaves. Once in a moment she was frightened by the shadowy presence of tangled live oak limbs all around her. Then she was near and among the presence of the little town of Silverhill down near the Alabama coast, and the pecan groves in between there and Fairhope, and then there was the bay and the sifting of breeze through the wings of a flock of gulls who seemed to see her and roll their beady eyes in her direction and nearly crash into one another in distraction. She held her long dark hair out of her eyes and gazed upon herself at that height and thought, Oh, I was beautiful, I look like, I don’t know. It was like the brief moment in her life between a child’s comfort in her own skin, and the burning new awareness of what she was to a man.
Here, the streets of Fairhope were like none of the streets when she was a child and they would visit — all these homes had sprung up since then, none of the old waterfront homes survived, long gone, she had long ago mourned them and now their own ghosts lay over the newer homes like veils, or mosquito netting. She skimmed through the old live oak tops on down to the Grand Hotel, the ghost of the original Point Clear Hotel itself now barely visible to her among the broad oak boughs and the steam coming from the ventilation pipes in the roof of its successor. None of the long galleries and the swings, though the promenade was the same. On the bay, on the water’s surface and out between two sunglint sailboats, a man leaning himself back out over the chop said hah! when his boat gave a tilt in her direction as she rose up to avoid a little wave. The man nearly fell out of his boat.
She spread her arms and legs and let the foamy tips of the chop skim into her navel, then deep into the water without the resistance to which she was accustomed, past the hulls of sunken fishing boats, the cracked beams of sailing vessels and the long bent and wrenched-off arms of hapless shrimp boats, the skeletal hulls of great tarpon resting in their long-quiet disgust, and automobiles, some she seemed to recognize from her youth, and she remembered the sinking of an early ferry taking travelers across to Mobile. She passed in through the rusted torpedo shaft of a submarine of which no one knew save those poor souls still locked inside, and drifted slowly past the stricken eyes of the crew boys who rode it to its death, and one said, Bless you, Miss Birdie, and she kissed his concave, whiskered cheek — he was all tears, in the briny deep. She left through the molecular lacunae of its old prop shaft and spinning blades. Seeing spindly legs ahead of her went to look, and circled with the speckled trout and a few lost snapper the beams of a natural gas derrick, and then swam away and left the water. Ahead of her lay the old fort. Through the decrepit buildings that were the captain’s quarters and the officers’ and enlisted men’s barracks, she came through cracked panes which gave her some dread, and along the floors where boards had pulled apart from one another in age and ill health, these buildings propped up with the crude buttresses of those who would preserve them, their galleries gone as if from faces had fallen their features, poor noses and teeth and jaw, exposing the yaw of the corpse. She was caressed by the cool, clipped grass of the lawn inside the fortress itself, seeming ancient but no older than her father were he still alive. She drifted through the dark archways and chambers and then back into the yard, paused at the bloodstain on the steps where she’d had her picture taken as a girl with her sisters, where some confederate had died and left his ineradicable mark in the mortar. She slipped over the lip of the gun bay for the old disappearing cannon, no longer there, but its ghost too still lingering, even steel leaving its shape somehow in the air, a lingering particulate shade, collecting itself in her honor, to swing up and out over the water, and she entered its bore and followed its sighting above the Gulf itself and kept going, the earth receding, and she thought she must keep going into the lighter air and nothingness, but was drawn back in a dreamlike shift from there to here, the old lighthouse, in the balmy air currents moving east along the peninsula. Over the old site of Palmetto Cove. She heard cries and went down. There were the general calls of the animals once native to the shore, the wild hogs descended from the pigs the soldiers let go when the fort was first shut down, and the older, indigenous bears and panthers and even the shy, retiring ivorybill. The glow from the treasure laid in by pirates and sought by everyone and never found now called to her from beneath cypress but she paid it no mind. There were pirates hanging a man from the hanging tree, and whipping others back into the water. But those cries she heard first now became apparent to her in the spirits of two young girls who drowned in the storm of ’06, huddled in the corner of a room in the house built by their father, who had earlier washed into the bay, their poor mother tumbled into a drowned thicket of scrub oaks whose dense branches held her by her clothing until the water rose and drowned her too. Soldiers would find their ravaged bodies in the trees in Bon Secour and would be ashamed at their own interest in the girls’ bawdy contortions, long dresses lifted and twisted about their heads like murderous turbans, their drawers torn and muddy. A soldier unable to contain himself would begin to cry, as the others stared and drifted in the tide, and then discovered another girl alive and hanging from the high branches by her long blond hair.