Lost Souls Recovered, page 36
Minnie Pearl returned to the rocking chair, and Ernest sat on the edge of the bed, holding his wife’s hand.
It was the loudest scream yet. “Okay, honey, do you feel the need to push?”
“Yes, real bad.”
“I’m going to start counting to time your contractions; each count represents one second,” Minnie Pearl said.
After a count of eighty, Eunice screamed again. “Do you feel like pushing?” Minnie Pearl asked.
“Yes!”
“Don’t. I’m going to start counting again.” The next scream came after twenty-five seconds. Minnie Pearl walked to the foot of the bed and lifted Eunice’s blanket and looked for signs that delivery was near.
“Keep your legs apart. Breathe slowly. Okay, now push. Give it all you got.”
Minnie Pearl saw the crown of the baby’s head. She placed her hand under the baby’s head, careful not to pull it, but to support the neck. “You’re doing good. Keep pushing.” The baby’s right shoulder came out next. Minnie Pearl continued to support the baby’s neck. The baby then turned left, allowing the left shoulder to come out. The baby slid out effortlessly and began crying immediately. She stroked the baby’s nose downward several times to remove mucous and amniotic fluid. She then wrapped the baby in a towel and placed the baby on Eunice’s chest, hoping the baby would begin to breastfeed.
The baby boy did not show an interest in breastfeeding. Minnie Pearl reached into her gripsack and retrieved a set of shoestrings. As she grasped the umbilical cord, the placenta flushed out. She then used a shoestring to tie the umbilical cord at four inches from the baby’s navel. She used another shoestring to tie the umbilical cord at eight inches from the baby’s navel. After an hour, she cut the cord with a sterile knife.
And after about another hour, the baby latched onto a nipple.
“I’m gonna stay here a little longer; make sure the baby and mother will be okay.” She handed Ernest a few sassafras leaves. “I want you to put these in boiling water. She’ll need this to drink.”
“What’s it for?”
Minnie Pearl had used it many times as a midwife and believed it helped. “It will help with her recover and keep bad things away.”
John and Tilla arrived within a couple of hours after the baby was born. Both lent effusive praise of gratitude to the medicine woman Maggie had recommended. “I don’t know what you did, but you worked a miracle,” Tilla said.
“Ah, thank the man up high,” Minnie Pearl said.
By one o’clock, the house began to fill with well-wishers. Minnie Pearl was satisfied that mother and baby would survive. She had to return to her children in Birmingham.
John, Tilla, and Minnie Pearl sat on the porch as they waited on her ride to the train station to take her home. John handed Minnie Pearl an envelope.
“What’s this?”
“It’s for your services.”
“Ernest already paid me.” She extended the envelope to John.
“No, you take this,” Tilla demanded. “You saved our daughter’s life.”
John stood up and shook his left leg to wring out the soreness in his knee. He went inside the house.
Minnie Pearl reached in her gripsack and retrieved knit bone. She handed it to Tilla and said, “Give this to John. It should help his knee feel better. Just use it to make tea.”
Tilla was curious about the contents of the gripsack. “What else is in there?”
“Oh, a bunch of things.” She pulled out a small jar.
Looking at the jar, Tilla said, “What’s that?”
“Mucuna leaves.”“What do they do?” Before Minnie Pearl could answer, Tilla said, “Let me guess; make tea with it.”
Minnie Pearl smiled and nodded.
“But what’s it for?”
“If you having a problem in bed, you and your husband drink it two hours before going to bed. Your husband may not fall asleep before he drops on the bed.” Tilla guffawed.
“Excuse me,” Minnie Pearl said. She stood up and walked off the porch.
“Where’re you going?”
“To look for Kirby.”
“Who is Kirby?”
Minnie Pearl told Tilla about Kirby’s disappearance when he was ten. Tilla’s eyes moistened. She told Minnie Pearl about Claude.
While waiting on Minnie Pearl’s ride, they walked a mile, calling the names of their lost boys.
52 — Fall, 1923
The number of occupants in the Davis household had decreased by one. Pearl married in the spring and moved with her husband to Colbert County. Three children remained: 20-year-old Maggie, 12-year-old Willie and 9-year-old Charlie. When not doing chores around the house, or tending to her small garden in the back of the house, Maggie spent her time working at the colored library and babysitting for a wealthy white couple. The boys continued to help John on the farm by feeding the animals, milking Clara, grooming the remaining mule and two dobbins, sowing the land for crops, and harvesting it all.
John and Tilla sat on their front porch as they did when most chores had been extinguished. He whittled a figurine, and Tilla started knitting a sweater.
Maggie walked up the steps returning from her job at the library. “Hi, Ma, Pa.”
“Hello, sweetheart,” John said.
It was Tilla’s turn. “Hi, baby.”
John and Tilla looked at each other as to determine who would say it first. Tilla figured John had a softer touch, and he broke the silence. “Sit down, Maggie.”
She stooped and sat on the porch, both feet resting on the step.
“We’re worried about you, sweetheart.”
She knew what he meant. She told him that there were a few boys whom she met at the library, but they seemed more interested in her body than the books. Maggie convinced herself if they showed an interest in the books first, then she’d possibly show an interest.
“Maggie, dear,” Tilla said as she put down her knitting project, “is there some great reason why you’re saving yourself?”
“Ma, I’m not saving myself.”
Tilla looked at Maggie askance. “Your sisters have mentioned your name to some men, but you’ve not shown an interest. There are young men at First Baptist. You’re not going to find a perfect man.”
“I know, I know. I’ll do better.”
A reprieve for Maggie arrived. Charlie chased Willie out the front door. “Hey,” John shouted, “settle down.”
Willie lifted his head back and drank from a whiskey flask.
“What is that!” Tilla said. She extended her right hand. “Let me see that.”
Willie handed it to her and said, “It’s just water.”
She poured out the contents. “I don’t care what it is. You have no business with this. Where did you get it?”
“Me and Charlie were playing on the couch; it was under the cushion.”
Tilla stood up and opened the door. “You boys go to your room. Now! Maggie, please excuse yourself.”
John saw Tilla’s question coming and said, “It’s not mine. Let me see it.”
Tilla handed it to John. He thumbed the engravings on the flask and shook his head. It was one of the flasks that he’d stolen from the Billingslys thirty-six years ago in Richmond. He searched his brain to figure out how it got under the sofa cushion. It came to him. “Honey, remember way back when Theo slept on the sofa?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“We talked for a good while. I didn’t say anything, but I could tell he had been drinking. I’m wondering if he had this flask, and it fell out of his pocket somehow.”
“There’s one way to find out.”
John stood up and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Money heard John’s footfall and scampered to him. John opened a closet in his tool shed and removed a metal box. He opened the box and pulled out a string-tied burlap bag. Money watched as John removed a whiskey flask from the burlap bag. As he held up both flasks, he thought about the night Madame Billingsly tumbled down the stairs and died. He thought about his mother, not knowing whether anyone told her that he stole the flasks.
He returned to the porch, holding both flasks. John wore a contrite look. “Honey, I need to tell you something.”
“Go on.”
He told her that he stole the flasks from the Billingslys, and why he stole them. He added: “I guess the clues to the supposed fortune are on these flasks.”
“You never told me about all this.”
“Didn’t really see a need to. Guess I’d been too embarrassed.”
“Why didn’t you go back to Richmond? You had the clues.”
“I met someone.”
“Who?”
“You.”
John had looked at the flasks and the engravings many times when on his long trek to Mount Hope. But each look would cause his mind to swirl, and headaches often ensued. So, he hung onto the flasks as far as he knew, but because of the torment they caused him, he decided to no longer look at the engravings.
But now it was time to look at them again. He felt a skosh of bile rising; he swallowed saliva, and it was gone. Looking at the front of one flask, John looked at the letters LGB in the bottom right corner. A sketch of a lady using one hand to cover her breasts and her long hair to cover her genitalia was in the center. A tree was engraved on the opposite side the of the flask; Empress was engraved on the vertical part of the tree with Ag 6’ just under the tree. With all our love, Edward and Marie was engraved at the bottom.
John turned his attention to the other flask. The front contained the letters TB in the bottom right corner. A man with curly hair from the waist up was in the center; his right forearm resting on the top of his head and part of the left arm missing. Turning it over, John saw a tree with Oak engraved on the vertical part of the tree with Au 6’ just under the tree. With all our love, Edward and Marie was engraved at the bottom.
“Does it make sense now?” Tilla asked.
“No, can’t say that it does. They’re supposed to be worth something. That’s what Monsieur Billingsly said in 1887.”
“Do you want to say something, or do you want me to say something to Theo about the whiskey flask?”
John needed to have a man-to-man talk with his son. “I’ll talk to him,” he said.
While still upset that Theo may have left the whiskey flask buried under the sofa cushion, she had another concern about Theo. She thought about the gunfire she heard and the man wearing a white hat at Moulton and Leaves. “I know where I saw that white hat Theo wears,” Tilla said.
“Oh, Lord, Tilla. What is it?”
Tilla asserted herself. “I saw that same white hat the day I heard that gunshot that appeared to come from that barn that Robert used to own.”
“There is more than one of those hats,” John said.
“But how many hats like that are stained with red clay on the back of the hat?”
“What’re you saying, Tilla?”
“I’m saying Theo was in that barn when that shot was fired.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m betting he knows something … He may know what happened to Reverend Owen’s son.”
k
Theo had done his best to shed his libertine behavior. His wife’s insistence that he hold a steady job, coupled with his desire to please his parents, helped him do it. Although he didn’t give up drinking, he stopped hanging out at the juke joint where bad things happened that he sometimes found himself in the middle of. Besides, because of his job at the foundry, there was no time to slum it.
With a week off work, he drove his car to his parents’ house. He had something to prove. He alighted from his car and walked toward the house where he saw John moiling the soil in inhospitable weather. John moved slower now; it was as if his bones and joints had begun to protest the years of work they had endured for so long.
“Pa,” Theo yelled.
John doffed his straw hat, wiped his brow, and squinted at Theo to ease the pain of the salty sweat. “Hey, son.”
“Pop, you look like you need some help out here.”
“The boys have been helping.” John turned and saw Charlie chasing Willie in the cornfield. Laughing, he said, “Maybe I do need some help.”
Theo was dressed to help; he wore the overalls that he wore when working in the foundry. “What can I do?” Theo asked.
Not much work needed to be done. John was mostly finished. Looking into Theo’s indulgent eyes, John knew he couldn’t turn down Theo’s offer. “I asked the boys to take some bales of hay out of the barn; they still haven’t done it.”
“I’m on it, Pop. Anything else?”
John began to temporize, trying to find the right time to talk to him about the whiskey flask. “Just do that for now. I’ll think of something else.”
An hour later, John and Theo found themselves on the front porch, rocking in chairs and sipping lemonade Tilla had made. Theo had noticed that Tilla had a sad countenance when he saw her. “Something wrong with Ma?”
“Not that I know of, son.”
A few seconds later, Tilla opened the door and handed John a bag, as if he needed a reminder of what he needed to say to Theo. She returned to the kitchen.
John held his glass up high and swirled his lemonade, watching the seeds spin. He finished it off and removed a whiskey flask from the bag. “Son, Willie found this under the sofa cushion in the living room. Have you seen this?”
Theo extended his hand, and John handed it to him. He looked at it and said, “I saw one like it; this one has a naked lady on it. The one I remember had a man on it.”
John removed the other whiskey flask and handed it to Theo. “Is this it?”
“Yeah, Pa,” Theo said, “where did you get this?”
“Like I said, Willie found it under the sofa cushion. Any idea how it got there?”
Theo scratched his head then said, “I think I know what happened. It must of fell out of my jacket pocket when I fell asleep on the sofa. You know, I wondered what happened to it.”
John was thankful that Theo had come clean. But the obvious question had to be asked: “Where did you get it, son?”
The night Capstone nearly killed him surfaced in his mind. “Pad gave it to me.” He wasn’t sure if he let the answer slip out, but he was sure more sinuous questions were on the way. Please don’t ask who Pad is, he said to himself.
“Who is Pad?”
He had told the truth once already, so he decided to stay on that path. “He was in the numbers business.”
“Go on.”
He could not bring himself to mention what Capstone had done to him. John could tell Tilla. He had to veer off truth’s path somewhat. “I was in a fight and got hit in the jaw. He told me to drink some whiskey to help with the pain; told me to keep this flask.”
“Do you know where Pad got the flask?”
“No, I have no idea.”
“Thanks, son. You’ve been a big help.”
Theo was curious why John had the two flasks. “Do they belong to you, Pa?”
“You come over next Sunday for dinner after church, and I’ll tell you.”
“Okay.”
John could see and feel that Theo was trying to make things right with him and Tilla. “Thanks, son.”
“For what?”
“I love you, son. I appreciate what you’ve done for Maggie. She met this man, William McKinley, at the library. She’s been going out with him.”
“He’s a good guy.” Pops.
“I sure hopes he likes to read. You know your sister.”
Theo smiled and said, “I think she got it from her newspaper father. Where is Maggie?”
“She may be in the back reading or tending to your mother’s garden.”
She sat in a chair on the back porch reading. “Hey, sis,” Theo yelled. “How’s Mack been treating you?”
“Real nice. Thanks, Theo.”
“Listen, sis,” Theo said, “something’s been eating at me, and I need to tell someone, or I’m gonna burst wide open.”
Maggie put down her magazine and looked at Theo. “I’m listening.”
“You must promise not to tell anyone. I need time to figure out how to handle it.”
She nodded.
“I know who shot Christopher.”
“You mean Reverend Owen’s son?”
“Yeah. You see, I used to work for this man, Capstone. He was the lead numbers man in town. I think he came to believe that Chris was skimming money from him. Don’t know if it was true, but Capstone said it was. He called a meeting at that shed that Robert used to own, the one near Moulton and Leaves.”
“You were at this meeting?”
“Yeah, I was there. Anyway, Capstone shot Chris as a warning to the rest of us.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone about this, Theo?”
“That’s just it, I didn’t know what to do. I was scared; still scared.”
“That’s a lot to digest, Theo.”
“I know. Remember your promise to me.”
Maggie nodded.
“I’m going to say bye to Ma now,” Theo said.
Tilla moved quickly away from the kitchen window to the living room. She sat on the settee and began to cry after overhearing Theo’s conversation with Maggie on the back porch. It all made sense to her now. It was Theo who wore the white hat coming out of the shed, just like she had feared. The gunshot she heard came from the shed.
“Ma,” Theo yelled, as he walked in the house. “Ma,” he repeated.
Tilla wiped her tears with the back of her right hand, stood up, grabbed a dust cloth and said, “Here I am, Theo.” She smiled, but she couldn’t hide her moist red eyes.
“What’s wrong, Ma?”
“Oh, you know how I worry about the family. But it’s nothing the Lord can’t fix. How have you been, son?”
“Doing good, Ma. The wife and kids are doing good, too. The job is hard work, but it something that’s steady.” He brushed away a tuft of hair that had fallen over Tilla’s brow and said, “Ma, you sure you okay?”
