I DROVE IN silence to Columbia. There was no music in the car. I seemed to drift along I-26, northwest through Dorchester, Orangeburg, and Calhoun counties, the lights of the cars that passed me in the darkness like flights of fireflies moving in parallel, slowly fading into the distance or lost to the twists and bends of the road.
And everywhere there were trees, and in the blackness beyond their margins the land brooded. How could it not? It had been tainted by its own history, enriched by the bodies of the dead that lay beneath the leaves and the rocks: British and Colonial, Confederate and Union, slave and freeman, the possessor and the possessed. Go north, to York and Lancaster counties, and there were trails once traversed by the night riders, their horses galloping through dirt and water, white-draped, mud-speckled, the riders urging them on, terrorizing, annihilating, stamping the first shoots of a new future into the dirt beneath the horses’ hooves.
And the blood of the dead ran into the earth and clouded the rivers, flowing from the mountain forests of poplar, red maple, and flowering dogwood, the sculpin and dace absorbing it into their system as it passed through their gills; and the river otters that plucked them from the water gulped them down, and the blood with them. It was in the mayflies and stoneflies that darkened the air of the Piedmont Shoals, in the black-sided darters that anchored themselves to the bottom of ponds to avoid being eaten, in the sunfish that hovered near the safety of the spider lilies, the beauty of their white flowers masking their ugly, arachnoid underparts.
Here, on these silt-loaded waters, the sunlight moves in strange patterns, independent of the flow of the river or the demands of the breeze. These are the shiners, the small, silvery fish that blend with the light reflecting off the surface of the stream, dazzling predators into seeing the shoal as one single entity, one enormous, threatening life-form. These swamps are their safe haven, although the old blood had found its way even into them.
(And is that why you stayed here, Tereus? Is that why the little apartment contained so few traces of your existence? For you don’t exist in the city, not as you truly are. In the city you’re just another ex-con, another poor man cleaning up after those wealthier than himself, witnessing their appetites while quietly praying to your God for their salvation. But that’s just a front, isn’t it? The reality of you is very different. The reality of you is out here, in the swamps, with whatever you’ve been hiding for all these years. It’s you. You’re hunting them down, aren’t you, punishing them for what they did so long ago? This is your place. You discovered what they did and you decided to make them pay. But then jail got in the way—although, even in that, you were making somebody pay for his sins—and you had to wait to continue your work. I don’t blame you. I don’t think any man could look upon what those creatures had done and not want to punish them in any way possible. But that’s not true justice, Tereus, because by doing what you’re doing, the truth of what they did—Mobley and Poveda, Larousse and Truett, Elliot and Foster—will never be revealed, and without that truth, without that revelation, there can be no justice achieved.
And what of Marianne Larousse? Her misfortune was to be born into that family and to be marked by her brother’s crime. Unknowingly, she took his sins upon herself and was punished for them. She should not have been. With her death, a step was taken into another place, where justice and vengeance were without distinction.
So you have to be stopped, and the story of what took place in the Congaree told at last, because otherwise the woman with the scaled skin will continue wandering through the cypress and holly, a figure glimpsed in the shadows but never truly seen, hoping to find at last her lost sister and hold her close, cleansing the blood and filth from her, the misery and humiliation, the shame and the pain and the hurt.)
The swamps: I was passing close by them now. I drifted for a moment and felt the car cleave to one side, crossing the hard shoulder, jolting against the uneven ground, until I found myself back on the road. The swamps are a safety valve: they soak up the floodwater, keep the rains and the sediment from affecting the coastal plains. But the rivers still flow through them and the traces of the blood still linger. They are with them when the waters reach the coastal plain, there when they enter the black water, there when the flow of the salt marshes begins to slow, and there at last when they disappear into the sea: a whole land, a whole ocean, tainted by blood. One single act, its ramifications felt throughout all of nature; and so a world can be changed, ineffably altered, by a single death.
Flames: the light of the fires set by the night riders; the burning houses, the smoldering crops. The sound of the horses as they begin to smell the smoke and panic, their riders wrenching at the reins to hold them, to keep their eyes from the flames. But when they turn there are pits set in the ground before them, dark holes with black water in their depths, and more flames emerge, pillars of fire shooting up from the interconnected caverns, and the screams of the woman are lost in their roar.
Richland County: the Congaree River flowed to the north, and I was floating above the road, carried ever onward, my momentum determined by my surroundings. I was moving toward Columbia, toward the northwest, toward a reckoning, but I could think of nothing but the girl on the ground, her jaw detached, her eyes already emptying of consciousness.
Finish her.
She blinks.
Finish her.
I am no longer of myself.
Finish her.
Her eyes roll. She sees the rock descend.
Finish her.
She is gone.
• • •
I had booked a room at Claussen’s Inn on Greene Street, a converted bakery in the Five Points neighborhood close to the University of South Carolina. I showered and changed, then called Rachel again. I just needed to hear her voice. When she answered the phone she sounded a little drunk. She’d had a glass of Guinness—the pregnant woman’s friend—with one of her Audubon colleagues in Portland and it had gone straight to her head.
“It’s the iron,” she said. “It’s good for me.”
“They say that about a lot of things. It’s usually not true.”
“What’s happening down there?”
“Same old same old.”
“I’m worried about you,” she said, but her voice had changed. This time there was no slurring, no tipsiness, and I realized that the hint of drunkenness in her voice was a disguise, like a quickly executed artwork painted onto an Old Master to hide it and protect it from recognition. Rachel wanted to be drunk. She wanted to be happy and merry and unconcerned, drifting slightly on a glass of beer, but it was not to be. She was pregnant, the father of her child was far to the south, and people around him were dying. Meanwhile, a man who hated us both was trying to free himself from the state prison, and his promises of bargains and truces echoed dully in my head.
“I mean it,” I lied. “I’m okay. It’s coming to a close. I understand now. I think I know what happened.”
“Tell me,” she said. I closed my eyes, and it was as if we were lying side by side in the darkness. I caught the faint scent of her, and thought I felt the weight of her against me.
“I can’t.”
“Please. Share it, whatever it is. I need you to share something important with me, to reach out to me in some way.”
And so I told her.
“They raped two young women, Rachel, two sisters. One of them was the mother of Atys Jones. They beat her to death with a rock, then burned the other one alive.”
She didn’t respond, but I could hear her breathing deeply.
“Elliot was one of the men.”
“But he brought you down there. He asked you to help.”
“That’s right, he did.”
“It was all lies.”
“No, not entirely.” For the truth was always close to the surface.
“You have to get away from there. You have to leave.”
“Please.”
“I can’t. Rachel, you know I can’t.”
“Please!”
• • •
I ate a burger at Yesterday’s on Devine. Emmylou Harris was playing over the sound system. She was singing “Wrecking Ball,” Neil Young’s cracked voice harmonizing with Emmylou’s on his own song. In an age of Britneys and Christinas, there was something reassuring and strangely affecting about two older voices, both perhaps past their peak but weathered and mature, singing about love and desire and the possibility of one last dance. Rachel had hung up in tears. I could feel nothing but guilt for what I was putting her through but I couldn’t walk away, not now.
I ate in the dining area then moved into the bar and sat in a booth. Beneath the Plexiglass of the table lay photographs and old advertisements, all fading to yellow. A fat man in diapers mugged for the camera. A woman held a puppy. Couples hugged and kissed. I wondered if anyone remembered their names.
At the bar, a man in his late twenties, his head shaved, glanced at me in the mirror, then looked back down at his beer. Our eyes had barely met, but he couldn’t hide the recognition. I kept my eyes on the back of his head, taking in the strong muscles at his neck and shoulders, the bulge of his lats, his narrow waist. To a casual observer, he might have looked small, almost feminine, but he was wiry and he would be hard to knock down, and when he was knocked down he would get right back up again. There were tattoos on his triceps—I could see the ends of them below the sleeves of his T-shirt—but his forearms were clear, the bundles of muscle and tendon bunching then relaxing again as he clenched and unclenched his fists. I watched him as he flicked his glance at the mirror for a second time, then a third. Finally, he reached into the pocket of his faded, too tight jeans, and dumped some ones on the bar before springing from his stool. He advanced on me, even as the older man beside him at last understood what was happening and tried to reach out to stop him.
“You got a problem with me?” he asked. In the booths at either side of mine the conversation faded, then died. His left ear was pierced, the hole contained within an Indian ink clenched fist. His brow was high, and his blue eyes shone in his pale face.
“I thought you might have been coming on to me, way you were looking at me in the mirror,” I said. To my right, I heard a male voice snicker. The skinhead heard it too because his head jerked in that direction. The snickering ceased. He turned his attention back to me. By now, he was bouncing on the balls of his feet with suppressed aggression.
“Are you fucking with me?” he said.
“No,” I replied innocently. “Would you like me to?”
I gave him my most endearing smile. His face grew redder and he seemed about to make a move toward me when there came a low whistle from behind him. The older man materialized, his long dark hair slicked back against his head, and grasped the younger man firmly by the upper arm.
“Let it go,” he advised.
“He called me a fag,” protested the skinhead.
“He’s just trying to rile you. Walk away.”
For a moment, the skinhead tugged ineffectually at the older man’s grip, then spit noisily on the floor and stormed toward the door.
“I got to apologize for my young friend. He’s sensitive about these things.”
I nodded but gave no hint that I recalled the man before me. It was Earl Jr.’s messenger from Charleston Place, the man I had seen eating a hotdog at Roger Bowen’s rally. This man knew who I was, had followed me here. That meant that he knew where I was staying, maybe even suspected why I was here.
“We’ll be on our way,” he said.
He dipped his chin once in farewell, then turned to go.
“Be seeing you,” I said.
His back stiffened.
“Now why would you think that?” he asked, his head inclined slightly so that I could see his profile: the flattened nose, the elongated chin.
“I’m sensitive about these things,” I told him.
He scratched at his temple with the forefinger of his right hand. “You’re a funny man,” he said, giving up the pretense. “I’ll be sorry when you’re gone.”
Then he followed the skinhead from the bar.
I left twenty minutes later with a crowd of students, and stayed with them until I reached the corner of Greene and Devine. I could see no trace of the two men, but I had no doubt that they were close by. In the lobby of Claussen’s, jazz was playing over the speakers at low volume. I nodded a good night to the young guy behind the desk. He returned the gesture from over the top of a psychology textbook.
I called Louis from the room. He answered cautiously, not recognizing the number displayed.
“It’s me,” I said.
“How you doin’?”
“Not so good. I think I picked up a tail.”
“How many?”
“Two.” I told him about the scene in the bar.
“They out there now?”
“I’d guess they are.”
“You want me to come up there?”
“No, stay with Kittim and Larousse. Anything I should know?”
“Our friend Bowen came through this evening, spent some time with Earl Jr. and then a whole lot longer with Kittim. They must figure they got you where they want you. It was a trap, man, right from the start.”
No, not just a trap. There was more to it than that. Marianne Larousse, Atys, his mother and sister: what happened to them was real and terrible and unconnected to anything that had to do with Faulkner or Bowen. It was the real reason that I was down here, the reason that I had stayed. The rest was unimportant.
“I’ll be in touch,” I said, then hung up.
My room was at the front of the inn, facing out onto Greene Street. I took the mattress from the bed and laid it on the floor, arranging the sheets loosely on top of it. I undressed, then lay close to the wall beneath the window. The chain was on the door, there was a chair in front of it, and my gun lay on the floor beyond my pillow.
She was moving out there, somewhere, a white blur among the trees, illuminated by bleak moonlight. Behind her, it bedecked the river with glittering stars as it flowed beneath the overhanging trees.
The White Road is everywhere. It is everything. We are on it, and we are of it.
Go to sleep. Go to sleep dreaming of shadows moving along the White Road. Go to sleep watching falling girls crush lilies beneath them as they die. Go to sleep with Cassie Blythe’s torn hand emerging from the darkness.
Go to sleep without knowing if you are among the lost or the found, the living or the dead.