Peach Grove and Chicago, 1909
The night was too deep, dark, and sweaty; even the haints didn’t bother to come out. The stars overhead looked out of place. Aidan hugged an old oak tree, moaning in the moss, so drunk he was lost close to home. A jug rolled away from his feet to a bear with a star-shaped scar on his cheek.
“Firewater. Not good for you. Don’t you get started with that.”
The bear nosed the blue stoneware. He licked the jug’s lip, grunted, and spit.
“I keep trying to give it up. I promise myself. I promise everybody. Then I’m at it again.” Aidan snatched his shotgun from the ground and pointed it at the bear. “My word’s not worth a damn. Can’t trust me. A miracle anybody can stand me.”
The animal reared up on his hind legs.
“What do you know? Seminole and Irish blood driving me to the drink. I can’t help myself.”
The bear gurgled.
“Miz Subie say Peach Grove broke my heart, and I need to find something to do with all the love I got for this world that’s curdling in my chest. Now I’m talking to a bear.” Aidan shot in the air. The startled animal took off into the woods. A turkey buzzard flew up into the dawn light, circling above him. “I ain’t dead yet,” he yelled at the bird. “So you can just go on.”
Somebody ’cross the creek played an out-of-tune banjo. The song was familiar. It was one of his. Aidan sang along, as hoarse and out of key as the broke-fingered player:
Running won’t set you free
Yeah, a man could still be a slave
On the loose and-a acting brave
In shackles he just don’t see
No—Running won’t make you free
Aidan’s voice splintered on the last note. He almost fell down. The banjo twanged on, a screechy sound crawling up his back. He reached for the jug, hoping for one last swallow. It was empty. He let it tumble away. A crow hollered at him. This close to sober, out of hooch and ammunition, wasn’t nothing to do but head into town and buy a drink; still a few coins in his pocket. He’d sworn not to bother with near-beer. After guzzling half a barrel you were burping and pissing and sober as a Sunday service. But what good were his promises? The bad banjo-playing made him itch. He scratched and squirmed and finally headed for a road he hoped led into town.
After almost losing faith in this direction twice, Aidan reeled down Peach Grove’s muddy main street just before dawn. Feeble shadows, otherworldly moans, and a sickly sweet stench greeted him. He sniffed his pits, down at his crotch, and then the air. It was the air that was most foul. Ten minutes and he didn’t see anybody upright but Doc Johnson and Hiram. They stood in white pinstriped suits by a wagon in front of Doc’s office, calming a gray nag. Aidan stumbled over to them, gesturing wildly.
“Peach Grove look like a ghost town,” he yelled.
“Folks are too sick to riot. Makes our job easy,” Doc said.
“What you mean?” Aidan looked ’round. “What job?”
“Where have you been?” Hiram poked at Aidan’s ripped shirt.
“Ah … hunting,” Aidan said.
Hiram and Doc exchanged identical looks. Aidan lifted the cloth covering the back of the wagon. Dead eyes stared up at him. He recognized a few. Ed Crawford’s blue eyes looked black as Mark Jessup’s. Fellows he’d known most his life, friends he never had, starting to swell and stink. Aidan dropped the cloth and stumbled back. Doc held him as he leaned forward, vomit-dizzy. Nothing in his stomach to come up though.
“What the hell?”
“We could use a hand. Unless you’re afraid of getting sick and dying.” Doc slapped his back. The blood rushing to his head turned back to where it belonged.
“Yellow fever snatched my folks.” Aidan righted hisself. “Didn’t want me.”
“Hiram and I haven’t gotten whatever is plaguing Peach Grove, not yet.”
“Feels like a curse.” Hiram surveyed the empty street.
“No such thing,” Doc said coolly.
“If it’s not Garnett’s curse or yellow fever what killed half of Peach Grove in a week and laid up the other half … What do you think, Coop?”
Aidan shuddered at the mention of Garnett’s curse. “I’m sure I don’t know.”
Doc shrugged. “Maybe we’ve discovered a new pathogen.”
“Patho-what?” Aidan asked. “Half of Peach Grove?”
“A new agent of disease,” Doc said. “Hiram exaggerates. He writes news.”
“It’s true.” Hiram grunted at his brother’s highfalutin, know-it-all airs and led the horse down the street.
Aidan couldn’t imagine plagues or curses bringing down the whole town.
“I guess God has forsaken us, like you’ve been saying, Coop,” Doc said. He and Aidan followed Hiram to a pretty white townhouse that looked brand-new. Doc knocked on the door, several times.
Hiram talked loudly at Doc’s back. “Yellow skin, sticking to shadows ’cause of what you call photophobia, light paining the eyes and making the skin ache. What’s that?”
Doc pushed the door open. “Hasn’t been any yellow fever since 1905 on account of some Cuban gent and Dr. Walter Reed going after mosquitoes.”
“Must have missed the grubs in Peach Grove,” Aidan said as they went inside.
Doc chuckled at the gallows humor and gave Aidan a look that he’d been giving him for years that Aidan could never figure out. His eyes were high-spirited and sad, as if he and Aidan were buddies who shared a hard secret or faced hard times without running away. Maybe if Doc wasn’t a rich man, they’d have really been friends.
The parlor smelled like the inside of a piss pot. Aidan tied a handkerchief over his nose and mouth as his eyes adjusted to dim light. The rotting death smell didn’t seem to bother Doc and Hiram who just went on ’bout their grim business. Blinking the room clear, all Aidan could make out was chaos: overturned furniture, broken dishes, flies, and a fat rat scampering into the corner. Doc shook his head over the remains of a woman who must have been dead for several days. Hiram hauled an old man with sallow eyes and skin in from another room. The man vomited rust-brown blood.
Aidan followed the sound of whimpering to the kitchen. A towheaded little gal was huddled under the table in her own filth. Aidan scanned the shadowy room. These were rich folk, and the kitchen was equipped with running water and modern plumbing. He picked the gal up and she moaned and trembled, from fear or pain or both. Setting her in his lap, he pumped water onto a clean cloth and dripped a few drops into her mouth. She sucked it down greedily.
“Whoa, whoa, go slowly now,” he said. He pumped more water, peeled off her clothes, and washed her clean in between getting her to drink.
Doc stood in the kitchen door, watching him. “You’re a good man, Coop.”
“You hardly know me,” Aidan replied. “Nobody know who I am.” He wrapped the gal in a clean towel since he wasn’t goin’ go hunting up a dress for her. She clutched him and muttered against his chest. A miracle she was still breathing.
“Looks to be more than just yellow fever,” Doc said.
“Don’t care what you call it, long as it ain’t Garnett’s curse.” Hiram spit in the hallway. “Peach Grove citizens are dropping like leaves. Even the lice must be hungry, no good blood to suck.”
“You always talk down everybody in town. What do you care?” Doc glared at his brother, but it was Aidan who’d wished these folks dead in Hell for what they stood around and let happen, not Hiram. Aidan scooped the child up.
“She might make it, with a little help.” He carried her into the parlor.
Doc covered her kin with a dirty blanket. She was an orphan now, ’cept maybe for the old man who didn’t look related to her.
“Fever might not kill her, but dehydration and neglect will,” Doc said.
The girl trembled in Aidan’s arms. “What are we goin’ do with them?”
The old man leaned into Hiram muttering gibberish.
“We can take ’em up the hill,” Hiram said. “Miz Caroline Williams opened her house for the live ones.”
“Did she now?” Aidan said.
The Williams place sat at the top of the only hill in Peach Grove—a gentle rise more than a hill—covered in grass and flower plantings, always something blooming, even in January. The mansion had been built before the war, when the Williams clan owned everything and everybody for miles. Patrick Williams had been determined to take back the birthright that got stolen from his family in the hard years after the war. His wife, Caroline, had continued this project after his death from apoplexy. The old house was a big white rambling thing with Greek columns, a red tile roof, elaborate porches, and second-story balconies. Six chimneys puffed smoke into the blue.
Aidan swallowed down the shakes. Scared he was ’bout to be completely sober and delirious, he hurried the sick gal through the Williamses’ fancy gate, a curlicue forest wrought in iron by slave craftsmen long dead and almost forgotten. The gate swinging shut clanged loudly behind him. The latch raked ’cross his back and drew blood. Those old black artisans were reaching through the years to challenge him. Aidan answered them with a groan.
Colored servants were tending sick white people on the porches and too busy to take note of Aidan standing with the gal on the bright green lawn. A fierce, gray-haired, gray-eyed woman tugged his weary arm. Miz Caroline Williams took the gal from him without a how-you-do or nothing. She was flat and square for a woman, so bony and sharp, not a sweet ounce of fat on her. Her fine dress was filthy. Sweat dripped down her nose. The gal clutched her. Miz Williams left Aidan stammering thanks in the mud.
Hiram drove the wagon to the undertaker. Doc and Aidan walked beside it. Raccoons scampered through rubble in the stores on Main Street. The curse meant a string of feast days for them.
“I’m surprised she’s taking folks in,” Hiram said. “She tell you why?”
“That woman doesn’t talk much anymore,” Doc said.
Aidan shrugged. He didn’t have much to say either since Redwood left. His hands shook. He’d kill for a drink.
“Caroline Williams ain’t been worth much since Jerome run north with that nigger gal.” Hiram was still mad over that.
“Mothers cleave to their eldest sons.” Doc rubbed his eyes.
“What was that gal’s name? A tree or some wild thing. They say she hoodooed Jerome.” Hiram scowled at Aidan.
“Pretty as she was, didn’t need magic.” Doc grinned, appreciating his Redwood memory.
“She’d need mighty mojo to make Jerome take her black ass all the way to New York. Love only go so far.” Hiram spit in the dirt.
“Maybe they stopped in Baltimore. Love might take you that far,” Aidan said.
Doc and Hiram laughed grimly. “You miss her more than all of us, I bet,” Doc said.
Aidan trembled, naked for a second. They had reached the undertakers. “What’s he goin’ do with all these bodies?” Aidan stared at the caskets piled in the front yard.
“Why these good people? Why smite down Peach Grove?” Hiram said.
“Life’s a crapshoot.” Doc went in to find the undertaker.
“We’re right neighborly for rich boys, isn’t that what you’re thinking?” Hiram poked Aidan’s ribs. Aidan shook his head. He was thinking on a drink. “Well, isn’t it?”
“My head’s full of moss.” Aidan clutched his sides to hold down the shakes. “And I done lost my daddy’s knife.” He fingered the empty scabbard, trying to remember where it could be. Ladd and Elisa’s? “That’s a Maskókî hunting knife, a hundred years old at least. A Creek warrior gave it to my grandfather. A shame to lose that.”
Hiram wasn’t listening to him. “I wouldn’t be out here. But you know how my brother is.”
“Ain’t you twins?”
“Not identical, as he is fond of telling me.” Hiram punched Aidan’s chest. “You look thirsty. Oh! Postcard from Chicago came for you, a month, five weeks ago now.”
Aidan jumped at this. “And you ain’t give it to me yet?”
“You keep going off on your hunting trips. Fancy minstrel show on the card. Who do you know in Chicago working for Mr. Selig?”
“Nobody.”
“I saw Selig’s traveling show once with Bert Williams. Funniest nigger I’ve ever seen.” Hiram chattered on ’bout this Williams fellow but Aidan wasn’t listening.
Maybe Redwood made it to Chicago, and she was up there doing the show she always wanted. That thought tasted good as a drink for a moment.
Several acts from the headliners at Chicago’s Magic Lantern Theatre, a blackfaced Redwood was costumed as a yellow-and-white chicken. She pecked and strutted across the stage farmyard, shaking her tail feathers, spreading her wings. Saeed also in blackface was a backcountry sharecropper. He had a red patch on his pants as if a giant with rouged lips kissed his bum. Looking over his shoulder, he crept through a hole in the fence, jumping and falling at every little noise, a clown, while Redwood was an elegant bird, preening and singing sweet nonsense to herself.
Saeed drooled at chicken Redwood. Seeing him pull out a giant knife and fork, she screeched and ran. They danced a chase scene ’round the barnyard: over buckets, rakes, fences, feed boxes, and blackfaced little children playing chicks. This offered Saeed a splendid opportunity for acrobatic pratfalls, somersaults, backflips, and balletic cartwheels. Throughout, Redwood did a splendid chicken mime. The white audience was unmoved till Saeed grabbed Redwood’s white tail feathers and plucked several large ones, exposing frilly red underwear.
Saeed turned to the audience and shouted in darky dialect. “Lord a mercy. You musta been in dat school for chickens.”
Redwood also spoke darky dialect. “Yassir, I’se got dat degree in barnyard philosophity.”
“Better dan dat ole coon academy. Ain’t no diploma for a spook chicken thief.”
“Gimme my tail feathers back.” Chicken Redwood roared like a lion, turned, and chased a terrified Saeed who dropped his knife and fork and scrambled through the hole in the fence. The red patch got snagged on a loose wire and pulled off as he shimmied through, exposing his sooty behind. The crowd applauded.
“You read the card, Hiram, who’s it from?” Aidan kept breathing through panic. Redwood wouldn’t have signed her own name and risked getting caught.
“I tried to read it.” Hiram grinned sheepishly. “Something ’bout working here now, you promised me, and then a lot of wiggly lines. A woman’s hand.”
Doc dragged out of the undertaker’s. He was shaken by whatever he and the undertaker had discussed. Dark circles of sweat and dust discolored his white pinstripe. He wiped his face. A tight squint turned to a devilish wink as he caught Aidan’s eye. “You got a sweetheart in the windy city you been making promises to?”
Too nervous to trust his mouth, Aidan shook his head.
“Come by the office, I’ll give the card to you,” Hiram said.
“We got several more houses to check.” Doc stretched aching muscles and tried to shake the gloom creeping over his face. “Good Samaritans, I could use nourishment before carrying on.”
Hiram spun ’round and looked toward the edge of town. “You got land across the creek, don’t you, Coop?” His jowls drooped like a lost hound dog. Doc stood behind him with an identical hangdog face as if he knew what his twin thought instantly.
Aidan rubbed his nose. “I been trying to run that farm into the ground.”
“We don’t know what you be finding over there.” They spoke in unison.
“What you mean?” Aidan could have peed hisself.
Doc gripped his shoulder. “Clarence went to see his Aunt Subie, that conjure woman, two days ago. He didn’t come back yet, and well—”
The horse spooked at nothing Aidan could see. He gripped the bridle.
“Nobody’s been over to the colored houses or the poor white trash living there.” Hiram stroked the horse’s neck, but she didn’t get calm.
“Yellow fever mosquitoes would be biting there too,” Doc said.
“Damn! The hell you say!” Aidan couldn’t help cussing. Why didn’t he think of that? Drinking too much made a man stupid, even when he was almost sober.
“Oh, so now it’s yellow fever.” Hiram punched Doc. “But when I say it—”
“Hey!” Aidan interrupted their spat. “You boys can finish up here.”
Hiram and Doc nodded and spoke in unison. “They’re your neighbors.”
Doc clapped Aidan’s shoulder. “I’ll meet you over that way later.”
“You’re going across the creek by yourself?” Hiram said.
“I promised her.” Aidan careened down the street.
“What’s wrong with you?” Doc chastised his brother when he thought Aidan couldn’t hear. “You got to call him trash to his face?”
“He isn’t one of them, not one of nobody,” Hiram replied.
“If I gotta do a bird, at least it could be something that flew! A snowy egret.”
Wearing Aidan’s clothes, her hair stuffed under his cap, the brogans tied tight, Redwood pranced with Saeed, dressed in Persian finery, down a drab cobblestone avenue. Hundreds of horse carriages and automobiles jammed narrow lanes on both sides of the central trolley tracks and raised a thick haze of dust, manure, and engine smoke. Tall buildings pressed tightly against one another and stretched for miles in every direction. With endlessly repeating windows, archways, and columns—undecorated, smoke stained, and monotonous—these streets were a stone honeycomb, home for worker bees, not people. Chicago was not the elegant White City Redwood had glimpsed at the World’s Fair.
“I’ve never been on this street,” she shouted to Saeed over the hubbub. “Too many streets in Chicago to collect them, I guess.”
Storefronts and stalls spilled onto the cluttered sidewalk, tempting the hordes hurrying every direction to spend a week’s wages on trifles. She drew Saeed out of the flow of foot traffic to a patch of stained pavement between a barrel of pickles and a rack of smoked sausages. Boxes of ready-to-wear dresses, skirts, and blouses were shoved in a dirty corner. A grisly merchant looked at her expectantly.
“Where are we going?” She pulled Saeed toward the pickles. “Tell me now.”
Saeed touched a patch on a frayed elbow of Aidan’s shirt. “Why do you hide in this man’s clothes?”
Redwood gazed at him, her head shaking, her tongue thick.
“Do you not say we are friends?” Saeed said. “Tell me.”
“His clothes make me feel safe.”
“What scares you?”
“Myself sometimes.”
“Really?” He raised an eyebrow, theatrical but sincere. “Who was he?”
“Nobody.”
Saeed shook his head. “You leave a trail of broken hearts. What about your own heart?”
“I miss him. I do. He believed in me.”
“Do you love him?”
“Never got a chance to”—she winced—“to love anybody.”
“Time’s not up yet.”
“Exactly. Ever think of doing some other kind of show? Ain’t you sick of da coon academy?”
“I know a colored hotel in the Black Belt looking for good acts.”
The Black Belt was the tight little hole on the South Side where they tried to shove all the Negroes pouring into Chicago, hundreds coming each day. Poor families of five and six were squeezed into two-room apartments and renting out closets to lodgers. No space, so little air, and hardly no prospects turned people into less than themselves. Was this where Mama and Daddy had hoped to find a bright destiny?
“Nothing’s the way I thought it would be.” She glanced at a red-faced woman skewering fat green pickles. The woman’s sweat dripped in the barrel.
“We might get a spot after hours”—Saeed turned her face toward him—“doing the kind of show you fancy. It’s a mixed crowd, very mixed. I thought we might audition this afternoon.”
“I had pictures like this in my head.” Redwood showed him a postcard of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
“Ahh. I came to the Fair too.” Saeed smiled. “And fell in love with your country. Never went back home. Here I am, still in Chicago.”
She was enchanted. “Did you perform on Cairo Street for your country?”
“Cairo is in Egypt, not Persia.”
“I’ve been studying the map,” Redwood said quickly, embarrassed.
“Someday perhaps, I could take you to Tehran.”
She remembered Persia crouched between Arabia and India on Aunt Elisa’s map, but couldn’t think of one city. “Is Tehran big as Chicago?”
“It is the capital, a jewel, nestled in the southern slopes of the Elburz Mountains, not far from the Caspian Sea. A place for one who loves mountains. And the Caspian Sea is five times your Lake Michigan. We could visit the Golestan Palace and see the peacock throne.”
He ran his fingers over the card. A painter had rendered a colorful view of the Midway Plaisance at night: a city of lights, of iron and steel archways and glittery arcades. It exploded into life for a moment, fountains spraying, fireworks going off, but Redwood caught herself before getting carried away and shoved the postcard in her pocket. Saeed flexed his fingers as if they tingled or ached.
“When I first arrived, I was young, foolish,” Saeed said. “Chicago almost broke my heart, but are we not in America?” He danced ’round her and the pickle lady. “A land of tomorrow, not yesterday, a land where—” He was twirling and tapping and making a spectacle of hisself. Passersby smiled. “—a magic lady rehearses into the night so a lost young man from faraway Persia is ready for a big chance when it steams to shore.” He took her hand and tugged her into his dance. People gathered to watch.
“You play the genie, not me.” She broke off midstep. The crowd groaned, disappointed. “If they want entertainment, they have to pay me.”
“Genie? It was your magic that saved me. Where would I be, what would I do without you?”
“Milton couldn’t last on that ankle, and Eddie can’t even count on his ownself. I wasn’t planning to leave The Act. Rehearsing with you was an insurance policy.”
“I was in the Injun chorus, now—”
“You’re a darky headliner!” She laughed so hard her sides ached. “You can act colored, wild Injun, or the fine white gentleman.”
Saeed didn’t laugh. “Why does this make you so sad?”
“I thought Chicago was where I could be who I am inside,” Redwood said softly. “What’d I know?”
After a moment of silence, Saeed laid his arm on her shoulder. “In my country, you and I, we couldn’t be friends and discuss such weighty matters or even wander the streets of Tehran carefree.” He observed the bustling street, a wistful look crossing his sharp features. “I miss home all the same.”
“Do you think home misses you?” she said.
Saeed laughed at her serious face. “Look! That one is ours. Hurry!” They ran through screeching automobiles and rearing horses to a trolley pulling up to the stop.
Somebody plucked out-of-tune notes on an ornery banjo, or a cheeky squirrel ran over abandoned strings. Aidan had visions of bloated, yellow-eyed corpses as he staggered ’cross the creek to Elisa and Ladd’s place. He fell twice, gashing his head on a rake in the front yard. Chickens pecked at the dirt by his nose, skewering kernels of corn. Happy pigs waddled from behind the shed to stare at him. Coffee brewing scented the air and made his stomach holler. Chaos had yet to come calling here. It was a regular Wednesday morning or Thursday; Aidan had lost track of the days.
As he stood up, the world tilted. In vain he reached his hand out to steady the horizon. “Iris?” he shouted and lurched toward the house.
Iris stepped onto the porch with his banjo. Eleven now, tall and beautiful in a Sunday dress, she looked like Redwood did at this age: proud cheekbones, stormy eyes, and dandelion hair puffing out from a hundred curling braids. Turning into a woman, and he hadn’t noticed. Aidan clutched his heart.
“You didn’t come and you didn’t come and you didn’t come,” Iris said. “Uncle Ladd thought you died of the fever or left without a word, same as my sister.”
“Why would I leave and not take you with me?” He scooped her up and squeezed till they both could barely breathe.
“You hurting me,” Iris gasped.
“Sorry, honey bun.” Aidan let her go.
“I can usually see folks wherever they are.” She sniffled. “I couldn’t see you no more, nowhere, just mist and smoke.”
“I was lost, and I almost forgot ’bout you, I won’t lie, but ain’t goin’ be no more of that.” And then he was hugging her again.
“She say”—Iris pointed into the gloom of the house—“if I played your banjo, your song, you’d come. Back from the dead even.”
“Your music called to me, but who tell you that?” Aidan squinted into the dark.
“Did you die? Is this your second chance?”
“Yes, ma’am, my second life.”
“Does everybody get one of them?” Iris almost dropped the banjo.
Aidan grabbed the neck and set it down. He wiped her runny nose. “Where’s your Aunt Elisa, Uncle Ladd? Them hardheaded cousins of yours are real quiet.” He took a step into the gloom of the house, but then stepped back.
Iris’s eyes blurred, her lips trembled, and she leaned into him. “We was doing okay. Some folks falling down sick, but everybody helping out, getting better.”
“Well, sure.” Aidan gathered her in his arms. “Elisa and Ladd be out there with food, water, medicine, easing the way for those ’bout to cross over. They could show the white folk a thing or two.”
“Miz Jackson lost her baby boy, but it wasn’t yellow fever, a coughing sickness.”
“Doc Johnson say something else going ’round.”
“Uncle and Aunt brought it home to us kids. Took the whole family. Left me alone. We did the burying last evening. I threw the first dirt on their faces.”
Aidan felt that dirt in his eyes. He slid down onto the steps, so stunned his heart skipped a few beats. He almost couldn’t believe what she said. Elisa, Ladd, and the cousins, dead and gone, and he didn’t get to say goodbye, thank-you-ma’am, nothing. Iris leaned against his chest and broke into tears. Aidan had never seen her cry before.
“What you talking ’bout alone? You and me. We’re a family.” He rocked her, terrified.
Iris grabbed the banjo and thrust it at him. He’d taken to leaving precious things here, in case a mishap befell him when he went hunting or so he wouldn’t just lose something, like his daddy’s knife, like the shotgun he left behind in the woods this morning. He took the banjo from her and held it against his chest.
“They didn’t leave you here by yourself,” he said. “I know that.”
Iris pointed into the house again. “She say, play that banjo and he’ll come, but I didn’t hurt it, did I?”
“Naw.” Aidan got the tuning in order. The strings hurt and nothing sounded right.
“I kept your banjo safe. Always do, when you go off.” She wiped at tears streaking down the side. “Play, please.”
His fingers were clumsy, tone deaf still, and he would’ve set the banjo back down, but for Iris’s tears splashing him. The fingers of his right hand stumbled on a lover’s lament where the left hand didn’t have much to do. Iris and the cousins would pester him to play this song whenever butter went rancid, hogs took sick, or the crop was scant, whenever somebody was just mad at creation. The whole tune didn’t budge off A minor seventh. Iris leaned against Aidan’s back and watched his fingers trip along the strings. Pain eased up off her bony little shoulders. When he played it a second time, a little better, she fell asleep against him and snored. Aidan set his banjo down quietly and laid her in the swing on the porch. Elisa’s chair rocked beside him. As tears flooded his face, a gnarled hand damped the motion.
“Boneyard baron rock an empty chair,” Subie said. Aidan wiped his face quickly. Subie come out the house dressed in indigo blue, a red mojo bag hanging from her belt. Silver bangles at her wrists and ankles banged together, making sparks of light but no sound. She smelled bitter and sweet, like the mug of steaming coffee she sipped. Her gnarled fingers made Aidan think of spider legs. He shivered and itched. Seemed Subie was spidering through his mind. “Past time you left Peach Grove, Aidan Wildfire.”
He jumped. He never told anybody his Seminole name, not two wives, not Cherokee Will or Doc Johnson, not even Redwood, the only real friend he ever had.
“Iris need to find her sister.” Subie touched a finger to his chest. “You too. I figure y’all can do that together.”
“Redwood and Mr. Williams could be anywhere.”
“Jerome’s light don’t shine no more.” Subie waved at Aidan’s mouth forming a tall tale. “Hush, I got a postcard from Chicago. Redwood tell me the whole story. Well, not the whole thing, but I read between the lines.” Subie thrust a red leather journal at him. “Ladd say you wrote all his lies into this book. Mice chewed the cover a little.”
Aidan wouldn’t take it. “You don’t wanna keep them stories?”
Subie made a sign from her heart to her head. “I got ’em already.” She put his alligator bag on top of the journal.
“What I need an ole Indian pouch for?”
“You give Elisa money in here to hold for Iris.” Subie winked her milky eye. “You holding Iris now, ain’t you?”
“Sure I am, but—”
“But nothing. Elisa and Ladd wanted you to have these things, if you come back from the dead. You back yet?” Subie sighed. “Ladd wasn’t sure you’d make it, but Elisa never stopped believing in you. She just couldn’t wait, had to move on up.”
Aidan closed his eyes on more hot tears. A blubbering drunk, what good was he goin’ be to Iris or anybody?
“Don’t go feeling sorry for yourself. No more time for that. Is this Jerome’s money?”
“Why can’t we just stay here?”
“Iris and Redwood need each other.”
“So why I gotta take her?”
“My teeth ’bout to drop out, I lean to one side, fall asleep frying eggs and ’llowed to burn down the house. Besides, you promised.” Subie slapped the book and bag against his chest. He grabbed them before she whacked his head.
“Going’s one thing. Getting there is another.”
Subie picked up his banjo. “You done lost the touch with your music.”
Aidan hung his head. He couldn’t play or sing worth a damn no more.
“You wanna play again, make Elisa proud, get you some dirt from the boneyard, good goober dust and take it to a crossing of roads. Iron roads be the best for you and Iris. Big black steeds charging every direction. Nine times, the sun’ll watch you race by. Drop goober dust where tracks crisscross. Blow it to the four directions. By the ninth horizon, you’ll be playing whatever music you want.”
“You trust me to do all that?”
“Chicago’s a mighty crossroads. Folk from everywhere, calling down powerful juju.”
“What I look like messing in powerful juju?” Aidan shook so bad, he spilled coins and bills from the bag. He caught the money before it hit the ground though.
“You goin’ make it, Aidan Wildfire.”
“You read my journal?”
“Naw, my eye be so tired these days, Luella got to read to me.”
“How you know my Seminole name? My true name.”
“You speak it sometime without meaning to.”
“Oh. So a conjure woman don’t hear underneath things, how everybody say?”
“You be turning into a ghost, you don’t feed your spirit.”
“You asking a lot of a hard-drinking man.”
“I see plenty whiskey bottles lined up in your mind. Amber sunset be playing tricks on you though. Every one of them bottles is empty!”
Subie chortled at her joke and sat down with him on the stairs. The sun sank under the creek. Iris sleepwalked from the swing to Aidan’s lap, snuggling up to him like when she was little. Holding her close was sweet comfort.
“Iris tole me you wanted to come back, to look for her,” Subie patted the gal’s head, “but you was lost somewhere in the dark. She played the banjo to call you home.”
A shooting star fell from the sky.
“That must be hitting ground in the boneyard,” Aidan said.
“A spirit come home.” She touched his bruised forehead. “You ’fraid Redwood might love you back and then what, huh?”
Aidan opened his mouth and then closed it. Under Subie’s gnarled fingers, most of the aches and pains drained out of him, but how could Redwood ever love him back? Subie struggled up and walked off into dusky fields, her ankles sparking. A second light fell out of the sky.
“Two down.” Aidan sighed. “So for sure I’m getting signs.”