Emendare, page 1
“Her name is Jane Doe? Really? You aren’t joking?”
“Yes. Her father’s name was John Doe. Her mother’s last name was Smith. Jane Smith Doe, that’s her. Her dad said he guaranteed her anonymity for life. Thought it was funny.”
Forty years away from Doe’s Ferry, it didn’t take long for word to get around that Jane Doe had come home. Most people remained unconcerned with her arrival—memories of young Jane having been long forgotten or never known. But like any tiny place with tiny minds, the whispers at her sudden reappearance revived old rumors and fanned long cold embers into a blaze.
“With your history, you can see why this sudden appearance would concern me.”
“My history? Which part? The part where we were cradle to grave friends, all of us, or the part where one of us died, three of us lied, and one of us went to prison.”
“I’m assuming that means this isn’t a nostalgic trip home.”
“No point in pretending…”
There were those who wished Jane had stayed gone. Most folks were willing to let the past die with the ones that lived it—but not Jane, and not the person who sent the package that summoned her home. Wrongs needed righting. The time had come for the truth of what happened at Doe’s Ferry to come to light. Jane Doe has come home to amend the record, to make it right: Emendare.
Titles from R. E. Bradshaw Books
Rainey Bell Thriller Series:
Rainey with a Chance of Hale (2017)
Relatively Rainey (2016)
Carl of the Bells (2015) (Short Story-ebook only)
Colde & Rainey (2014)
The Rainey Season (2013) Lambda Literary Awards Finalist
Rainey’s Christmas Miracle (2011) (Short Story-ebook only)
Rainey Nights (2011) Lambda Literary Awards Finalist
Rainey Days (2010)
The Adventures of Decky and Charlie Series:
Out on the Panhandle (2012)
Out on the Sound (2010)
Sand Letters:
Book 1: Silly Love Songs 1976-1977 (2018)
Hiding Hearts: An Appletree Swamp Romantic Escapade (2018)
Molly: House on Fire (2012)
Lambda Literary Awards Finalist
Before It Stains (2011)
Waking Up Gray (2011)
Sweet Carolina Girls (2010)
The Girl Back Home (2010)
Emendare
By R. E. Bradshaw
© 2019 by R. E. Bradshaw. All Rights Reserved.
R. E. Bradshaw Books/April 2019
ISBN-13: 978-0-9989549-8-1
http://www.rebradshawbooks.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebradshawbooks
Twitter @rebradshawbooks
For information contact rebradshawbooks@gmail.com
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author and publisher.
Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Dedication
Deb.
“This thing that men call justice, this blind snake that strikes men down in the dark, mindless with fury, keep your hand back from it, pass by in silence.”
Maxwell Anderson, 1935
“Winterset”
1
Let’s start here…
“Do you know why they call this Doe’s Ferry?”
A middle-aged bottle-blonde in need of a root touch-up held a camera to her eye. Struggling with the weight of a giant telescoping lens, she clicked away at the deepening colors of the sunset over the Albemarle Sound and glanced at her male companion between shots.
“It’s a charming tale,” she went on.
Blondie spoke in a thick Northeastern North Carolina accent—a confluence of Virginia drawl and coastal twang. I noted the amateur historian layered the southern sugar on a little too thick to be genuine, while she lilted her way through the tourist trap mythology of the abandoned ferry dock. Her companion looked bored as hell. I just wanted them to go away.
“It’s said, back in the colonial days, a doe—as in,” the woman paused to sing, “doe, a deer, a female deer.”
The tall gentleman with her, wearing skinny jeans and working too hard to be hip, nodded impatiently. “Yeah, yeah. I got it without the Julie Andrews,” he said.
Maybe that’s what he said. He pronounced only the essence of his words, abandoning the hard consonants on the ends and allowing vowels to swim about in his cheeks. I thought he’d be more at home in a pub somewhere along the Thames. English explorers peered over this expanse of water for a glimpse of the mainland more than four hundred years ago. The historic landscape remained virtually unchanged but unimpressive to this modern day Englishman.
The blonde lowered the fancy digital camera from her eye. “You're cheeky, Richard. Do you need a snack?”
The Englishman’s hands popped out of his pockets and up into the air. He screeched, “What? I understood it was a feckin’ deer, Helen. I’m not a toddler in need of a nap. Finish the bloody story.”
“Isn’t the sunset beautiful?” The woman seemed willing to ignore her companion’s worsening attitude.
“Bit like lookin’ over Saint George’s Channel, innit? Same ol’ sun at evenin’ tide.”
In response, Helen raised the camera again and took a long burst of pictures. I couldn’t tell if she was letting the snide remark pass or plotting her date’s demise. I would have gotten up a head of steam and pushed him off the dock, but that’s just me.
The setting sun painted the prismatic rippling surface of the water with the full expanse of the color wheel. I’d come to the water to “do dusk,” as my dad used to call it. He’d roll one up and burn it down, then head out to the dock to enjoy his buzz in peace. I had a few cannabis edibles an hour ago when I crossed the county line and had been basking in the familiarity of this particular falling of the sun. Richard and Helen were a distraction, but I couldn’t help being amused at the train wreck it was becoming.
Richard’s skinny jeans must have been squeezing his tiny brains. He certainly wasn’t using his big one. He kept up the provocative attitude, apparently looking to end the date abruptly. He chided the photographer as she continued to snap away.
“The silent treatment is a childish ploy used by cowards. At least that’s what my ex-wife’s therapist told her to tell me.”
Richard chuckled a little, in an attempt to assure his audience that the recollection was meant to be humorous. Stand-up comedy was not his forte. Helen was not amused.
She lowered the camera and glared at the man she had liked until about five minutes ago. “Fuck you, Richard.”
“Not likely with that attitude,” he answered back.
“I don’t see any need to continue this charade. You’re not having much fun, are you?”
“Well, now that you mention it, you’ve had me in a car all day, runnin’ about the countryside peerin’ at,” he made air quotes around, “antique things.”
Helen looked and sounded genuinely surprised. “Your profile said you loved relic hunting.”
The date already a disaster, Richard laughed. “This rubbish is far from old. The foundation of my grandmother’s barn was growin’ moss when they built that expatriate jail you’re so proud of.”
Richard pointed over his shoulder at one of the first jails erected in the region during the late 1700s. The original lost to fire, the jail standing now was built in the early 1800s on the old foundation with the addition of an adjacent county courthouse. Our English visitor had spotted the bait and switch in the tourism marketing team’s wording of “colonial foundation.” But why bother with that factual detail?
The county erected a set of replica stocks for photo ops on the courthouse lawn and let the colonial legends take flight. The lore was part of the tourist draw to a county desperate to replace the waning traditional agricultural and watermen economies. Albemarle County wasn’t on the main route from the north down to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, so it had to work to draw visitors off the faster four-lane highways. Now that the bypass bridges were built and the ferry route closed, the people of Doe’s Ferry couldn’t be faulted for a white lie or two.
Richard continued, “Show me evidence of Viking exploration or ancient Native American relics and we’ll talk about old things. You New World yanks act as if you were the first ones here.”
“I’m not going to take colonization insults from a British imperialist. I think this date is over,” Helen replied, with no trace of the sugary veneer left on her drawl. She headed for the driver’s side door she’d left open in her excitement upon arriving.
“Aren’t you going to throw tea in the harbor before the revolution?”
I stifled a laugh. Okay, maybe Richard had a future behind the microphone. Helen, again, was not amused.
“Well,” Richard said, following her, “now you’re withholding information just to be cunty. How American of you.”
Helen whirled to glare at him and s pat out the romanticized fable of Doe’s Ferry. “During a hurricane, a doe washed up here with her baby on a small raft of storm debris. It’s probably a lie, just like your profile suggested you were an English gentleman with a passion for history.”
“I am,” Richard argued. “I’m sure it’s a lovely story. Although it does lose some of its historical quaintness when told through gritted teeth.”
Helen reached the car, tossed the expensive camera on the passenger seat and climbed in. The door slammed with force as the engine turned over. Helen wasted no time and left no doubt Richard would need a ride home. She peeled away, sending gravel flying in a plume of trailing tire smoke, but didn’t go far. The courthouse stood less than one hundred yards from the old ferry dock. The North Carolina highway patrolman waiting to pull out of the parking lot had only to flip on his blues and slide in behind the angry blonde for the first ticket of his shift.
“Fuck it all,” Richard complained. He pulled a cell phone from his jacket pocket and began waving it about above his head, in search of a signal. It was at this moment that he realized I had witnessed the entire scene.
I had been sitting on the picnic table next to the dock’s tiny public restroom doing dusk, floating up and down memory lane—or the memory docks, as it were. The Brit and Helen were just the latest to interrupt my reflection on the innocence of childhood and how quickly we discover we’ve been fed a line of crap since day one. Bad men win because they do not play by the rules. Rules are for suckers. The myth of triumphant decency could be found in the last national election and in the number of cable news satellite trucks hovering about Doe’s Ferry.
Multiple photojournalists shooting B-roll of the Albemarle Sound had come and gone from the dock during my short time of observance. Everyone wanted to be first on the scene when the President cut the shortlist for the next nominee down to one. If one believed the rumors, my childhood neighbor was next in line.
I felt my old friend nausea returning and popped another twenty-five milligrams of medicated chocolate into my mouth. My stomach had been in knots since I arrived. Past mistakes churned against my stomach lining, eating it away. I knew I’d die of a bleeding ulcer if I remained in Doe’s Ferry long.
My movement drew Richard’s attention.
“Oh, hello,” Richard said, taking a few steps in my direction.
If I ever possessed the southern hospitality gene, I killed it on a peyote quest with some old hippies in the Black Hills in the late 80s, far from here. It was then that I decided my motto would be “fuck people.” I’m so glad I thought better of getting that tattooed on my neck after I came down. Even behind dark sunglasses, my lack of interest in social engagement must have registered with Richard.
He stopped his approach and asked, “I don’t suppose they have car service this far from civilization?”
I raised my eyebrows so they could be seen above the rims of my glasses. Lowering my chin and curling my upper lip into a sneer, I maintained a “Do Not Enter” perimeter with nothing more than body language, a skill picked up in prison.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That sounded worse than I meant it to.”
People get hung up on my stint in prison. It is hardly the most thrilling or mysterious part of my story. I took my first breath in a high school locker room not far from the ferry dock. Fifty-eight years later, I had come full circle—back to the land of my people.
As Richard noted and the desperate waving of his cell phone at the sky emphasized, we were far from civilization. Cultural advancement lagged on this stretch of sand and swamp sandwiched between the mainland and the coastal counties on the Atlantic Ocean. The po-bocra—longstanding Carolinian slang for white trash—gripped tightly to the deeply planted roots of white supremacy. The haves told the have-nots that the have-nothings were stealing everyone blind, while the haves got richer and fed the fires of social unrest. The mask of civility worn by the God-fearing, law-abiding, deeply rooted citizens of Albemarle County slipped on and off as quickly as their drawls and drawers.
“Grandma, last one in is it,” a child’s voice drifted on the breeze into my thoughts.
On the old dock to my left, two children ran out in front of a middle-aged woman in a white beach wrap and hot pink flip-flops. The cut of her blonde hair—an excellent dye job—held captive by a white visor, the rhythm of her gait, the glimpse of her profile, all hints of a woman I used to know. She had a phone pressed to her ear, but listened to her grandson.
She held up one finger, finished her call, and then challenged, “Marco!” She dropped the phone in her pocket and removed the wrap to expose her hot pink bathing suit. Grandma was still a hottie, but she knew it, making her less attractive and leaving my “selfish bitch” opinion of Cindy Spencer unchanged.
The kids yelled, “Polo,” and jumped into the water.
Doe’s Ferry faded back to a memory.
2
Sin is always attractive…
“Jane Doe, you know I can’t kiss a black boy. It’s in the bible.”
“It’s 1972, Cindy. No one cares about what it says in that old book about black boys kissing white girls. Don’t y’all study Civil Rights in sixth grade?”
William Malachi Blount, Jr., the black boy in question, was my friend and my third-half-cousin. It’s complicated. Malachi and my dad shared a great-great-grandfather, but not a great-great-grandmother. Skin colors and races meant a lot more to other folks than it did to two kids grown from birth together. I was barely a month older than Mali. We hadn’t known there was a difference between us until we started school. Now, at age eleven, it had been made clear to us that people didn’t see the world like Mali and me.
Cindy Spencer was having none of my argument. “Civil Rights means Mali can ride our bus and go to school with us. The bible still says we are not to mix the races.”
Malachi spoke up, “Actually, it says—”
“Marco,” Doodie shouted, coming to the surface about ten feet away, eyes squinted shut.
Hains said to him, “We’re not playing anymore.”
Doodie opened his eyes and rubbed the brackish sound water out of them. He tried to focus on the rest of us. “Man, I was down there a long time, probably ten minutes at least.”
Hains disputed Doodie’s fantastic claim. “No way, man. One minute tops.”
I continued trying to convince Cindy to sacrifice her morals for the cause.
“Well, you kissed me, and I’m a girl. I’m pretty sure that’s in the bible too.” I shoved Malachi toward her. “Go on, Cindy, kiss him.”
Cindy ignored Malachi, stepping around him to preach at me instead, “It just says boys can’t lie with boys. Besides, girls can practice kissing on each other. My brother said so.”
Hains nodded, agreeing with Cindy’s older brother’s pronouncement because J.P. Spencer was already in college and Hains thought that made JP the expert on everything.
“It’s okay because girls can’t get each other pregnant,” he said with mock authority. “It’s safe for them to kiss and stuff.”
“I don’t think kissing is how you get a baby, Hains,” Doodie said, pointing down below the surface of the water to his crotch. “It happens down there,” he mouthed. His cheeks flushing red, Doodie was overcome with giggles.
“Shut up, Doodie,” Hains, ever the alpha male, barked at his toady. He slapped the surface, sending an arch of water into Doodie’s face.
Malachi looked kind of scared. He had never kissed a girl—let alone a white one. He wasn’t as enthused as we were about the prospects and agreed with Cindy that this was a bad idea. His daddy was all the time hollerin’ after us, “That white girl is going to get you in trouble.”
I focused on Cindy, arguing, “If girls kissin’ was okay, you wouldn’t tell me we had to keep it a secret. We can keep you kissin’ Malachi a secret too.”
Cindy rolled her eyes and whined, “Well, it’s not a secret now.”
