The morning after Sister Georgia’s memorial, Mary Elizabeth and Clarisa Pool were driving along narrow, rutted country roads outside Stanford. Clarisa had to be in Richmond for work at nine. When they turned onto the dirt road they were seeking, the only sound was the hum of the engine as the car bumped along. Nothing moved in the few tumbledown cabins they passed but a few chickens in the yards. A dog barely lifted its head as they passed a cabin about half a mile after the turn onto Black Pool Road, and Clarisa pointed out her open window to say, “That was your grandparents’ place.”
Mary Elizabeth glanced and nodded but kept her eyes on what there was of a road. When it finally petered out just before a stand of trees along a creek, Clarisa signaled for Mary Elizabeth to pull alongside the old fence to their right.
They stepped out of the car to the sound of one lonely bird singing. Beyond the fencerow was a field of clover, and the grass they stepped through was wet with dew. The sky was busy with gray clouds, rain about to fall any minute, and the green, living smell of the morning was too much suddenly, filling Mary Elizabeth’s lungs until they hurt, until her heart was almost breaking. All she wanted was to get back in the car.
But Clarisa, even heavier now than she had been a year before, was already walking ahead of her, moving with dogged effort and concentration toward the row of trees, and Mary Elizabeth made herself fall into step behind her.
Then Clarisa stopped and pointed at a broad stump on the ground to her right. Its wood was gray, parts bleached almost white, and it was covered with tangled green vines.
“That’s it,” Clarisa said. “That’s where it was. They cut that tree down two days after she found him. Thirty years ago now.” She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her uniform and wiped her eyes and face.
Mary Elizabeth felt her knees start to give way, then straightened herself and took a breath. Strong and good, she thought—unbidden words—and she shook her head to banish them. The air was damp and humid, warm already, and sweat was rising on her forehead and on her sides. What was this thing in front of her? What did it mean for her to be here now, on some green back road deep in the Kentucky hills, trickle of stream down below, land no one bothered to farm now, grass and vine and clover without memory of that day? And a tree stump, also, she thought, without a memory of its own.
She felt she ought to say something but couldn’t think of what. “Hard to imagine that old stump as a full-grown tree with a body hanging from it,” she said, surprised by the flatness of her voice.
“Not really,” Clarisa said, standing there beside her, looking ahead at the sky. “It’s not hard to imagine that at all.”
Later, after she dropped Clarisa Pool at the Stanford hospital, Mary Elizabeth grew uncontrollably cold, shaking as she drove. At the edge of town, she pulled to the side of the road, put her head down on the wheel, and wailed.
She didn’t leave for Martinique the next day after all. Instead, two weeks later, she followed Marcus Dyer to Paris, where he knew some other musicians he could play with, and where he thought he might just try to wait out this goddamned war.