6
EVERLY
Present day
From my bedroom nestled in the high left corner of my home, two crows outside my window woke me, as they did each morning with their raucous calls. Soon others would join them. I lay still, listening, waking slowly. After Mora had passed, Mom had offered to let me stay at the family home—you know, get my feet back under me in familiar territory. But I loved my rented one-bedroom home that sat on a corner in the historic district behind ivy-covered walls and ancient mortar. I adored the bright blue front door that I’d painted myself and was hidden in an alleyway. I shared the back courtyard with six other people.
I stretched and looked out the window to the left of my bed, which was the reason I’d rented this place—tall and wide, it revealed a striking view of St. John the Baptist’s double steeples and the wide sky over my beloved city.
When I’d first moved in, the window had been painted shut, but after hours spent chiseling away with Mora, razor blades and screwdrivers our tools, we’d pried it open and sat on the flat roof to gaze out. “You think we’ll ever leave?” she’d asked while the sky turned blood-red with sunset.
“I don’t know. I hope not.” I’d turned to her. “Or I hope so. I can’t decide.”
“I get it.”
She always got it. She always got me.
Our roots dug as deep as the oldest tree—both of us could tell you what anything in the city was before, and what it was today; we’d both attended Country Day and Sweet Briar College; our families were charter members of the Oglethorpe Club and our mothers Colonial Dames; our fathers and grandfathers had belonged to the St. Andrews Society. We each had family buried in Bonaventure Cemetery. Now Mora was there far ahead of most of us.
Very few of my childhood memories didn’t include Mora, with her ginger hair springing wild about her freckled face, her laughter so loud and her sense of adventure so bright that they sometimes blinded me. I had faded behind her light, but I didn’t care; even if I was the shadow cast by her sun, at least I was part of the adventure that was life with Mora.
With her memory vivid the morning after Oliver had visited me in the classroom, I slipped from bed and opened that window, stared out at the brightening sky. The world slowly came to life; first the bird calls and then the trees, bushes and brick wall of the garden took shape, emerging from the dusky dawn.
A shipwreck found. An exhibit to curate with the freedom to handle the job as I pleased. History to uncover. These were the siren calls I realized now I would answer even as I’d pretended I might not. As if there were ever another choice. I’d made it—somewhere deep down—the minute Oliver had asked. Because the only thing better than avoiding my own life at the present moment was completely involving myself in the lives of those who came before me.
My backpack slapped against my shoulder blades as I took a left onto Charlton Street and passed its centuries-old homes. I knew the history of many of the families who lived in them. Tourists might hear brief remnants of the tales but they’d never know the full truth—whose son had been lost to drugs and alcohol; whose fortunes had dissolved in gambling losses; whose husbands had philandered their way to divorce and financial ruin. Then there were the beautiful stories—the families that gave their wealth to help the helpless and never asked for recognition; the great love that led to great works of art; renowned parties where lifelong friends met for the first time. Stories at every turn.
In two blocks I reached Bull Street and took a left, passing Monterey Square, and headed toward Forsyth Park.
In the summer morning, Savannah’s historic district stood proud, as if daring any city to look better than she did. Passing students from the Savannah College of Art and Design and camera-toting photographers, weaving among business people and shopkeepers, I made my way to the park that had once been surrounded by an iron fence to keep the cows inside.
In Forsyth Park petals fell from the tulip poplars like pink confetti, and the grass was vibrant green. Dandelions persisted stubbornly despite bikes and countless feet running over them. The magnolia trees with their creamy blooms as big as dinner plates would later leave unopened pods on the ground, where they would burst with red seeds that stained the concrete.
I was lost in the beauty of the park’s thirty acres, and thinking of the days when this was the promenade where nineteenth-century women of a certain class took their exercise. I was smiling at the image of their big-skirted gowns and elaborate bonnets when a motorcycle gunned its engine at the green light, jangling my every nerve. I froze and then ran a few yards into the park before bending over to catch my breath beside the hundred-and-fifty-year-old fountain that had been dyed green that St. Patrick’s Day more than a year ago.
And the jarring memory arrived just like that, just like it always did—with a flood of fear, and an asphyxiating sensation where the waters of memory swamped me.
Everything shimmered green that day—the March trees bursting with the neon green of new leaves; the hats and shirts and silly shamrock headbands of the revelers all bright kelly green; the beads thrown from the parade floats all green.
Mora, Oliver and I stood at the granite curb behind yellow tape that screamed CAUTION. The drumbeat of a high school band floated down the cobblestone street, the tubas and trumpets discordant as they played an Irish tune that didn’t sound quite right when played by brass instruments.
The simple joy of a spring afternoon spent in the city I loved with the people I loved filled me to laughter. After a four-year relationship had shattered six months before, my broken heart had slowly healed, and the sun was warm without the summer blaze we all knew was fast approaching.
With Mora and Oliver, I never felt like a third wheel; I never felt like an intruder. I loved them both. I’d worked with both Oliver and Mora at the Rivers and Seas Museum, and when I wasn’t around, they’d fallen in love. Neither had wanted to tell me, thinking I might feel left out and worried about my newfound belief that love wasn’t worth the effort, but it wasn’t that damn hard to figure out. No one with eyes and a heart could miss what was happening between them.
We stood next to each other, a row of three, at the edge of the sidewalk; Oliver between Mora and me while the sounds of the parade drew closer.
Oliver pointed at a floating leprechaun balloon. “I bet the real St. Patrick never saw that coming.”
“When he chased out those snakes and spread the good word,” I said, “I doubt he envisioned green beer and people wearing shamrock headbands.”
Oliver laughed and bumped me with his shoulder. “You’re funny.”
I bumped Oliver back, and while laughing, both Mora and Oliver took two steps to the right. That’s the simple math. Two to the right because I bumped them, because I gave a little push with my hip. I stepped into the space where Mora had stood only seconds before.
At that moment, the revving of a car engine startled us, and we looked up to see a sleek red vehicle hurtling toward us. It took only a second, maybe less, maybe more, for me to wonder why the lead parade car was going so fast and why in the world it was red instead of green. This inane thought was my last just as the car veered into the crowd, through the ineffectual yellow tape and onto the sidewalk where I stood with my best friend and her fiancé.
Behind the windshield, I saw his face, or more accurately his dead eyes—they were dark brown under thick eyebrows; his long black hair touched his shoulders; his beard scraggly and long. And then in a primal reflex, I ran, my legs taking over all rational thought. I took four steps, or was it five? Later, I went over and over this in my mind. Four or five? Did it matter? Mora took only one before she was hit and thrown sideways into the crowd, her arms and legs bent at angles that still haunt my sleep.
Oliver was also hit sideways, rendered unconscious, but his chest rose and fell with his breath. His arms were splayed and his left leg caught beneath his right in a way that wasn’t natural. Someone screamed to call 911 and I froze.
Others had been hit, too, and they moaned and cried out, but not Mora. She was still and silent, her red hair fanned out and mixing with blood on the cracked sidewalk next to Lafayette Square. Her eyes were open—this I will never forget—staring at the cloudless sky. Her left arm twisted over her head. Blood ran from her ears and nose, and a puddle formed behind her head. I vomited onto the sidewalk and then a scream, shrill and foreign, erupted from my throat.
The man with the dead eyes flew from the driver’s side and ran through the crowd. No one had the wherewithal to stop him; there were lives to save. He smelled like an outdoor bathroom, stale and damp, as he slammed past me and disappeared around the corner. I retched again at the physical contact, but it unfroze me, set me in motion. I ran to Mora and knelt beside her while sirens wailed toward us. I tried to stop the blood. I screamed her name. A man grabbed me. “Don’t move her. Don’t touch her. They’re coming.”
I looked to Oliver, but he lay next to her without moving, breathing but unconscious.
It should have been me.
The memory finished having its way with me, and I sat on a wooden bench in Forsyth Park and breathed slowly—four count in, hold for seven, blow out and hold for eight—over and over using this technique. The driver’s dead eyes—if I ever saw them again, I would know him. I would know those eyes in the middle of the night. I looked for them; I ran after men who had the same build and dark hair. Someday, I believed, I would find him.
After another breath, I stood and shakily walked down the long sidewalk to the park’s south end. Grief, with its choking reminder, arrived with the guilt of having let myself forget for even a minute that she was gone. It wasn’t fair to Mora to be happy.
The idea was, of course, ridiculous. Everyone told me that. The grief books, the psychiatrist Mom had sent me to; Allyn, who cried out that Mora, more full of life than anyone we’d ever known, would want me to be happy.
In a few steps, I found myself in front of the Sentient Bean—it was our favorite coffee shop. Out of both honor and habit, I walked there many mornings for coffee to go.
“Everly!” I turned to see Sophie, my dear friend. I missed her. I hadn’t seen or talked to her, or anyone else aside from family or co-workers for that matter, in months. Sophie ran to me and engulfed me in a hug. She stepped back, keeping her hands on my shoulders. “I’ve missed you so. I’ve been calling and calling.”
“I know.” I exhaled. “I’m sorry. I’ve been a terrible friend.”
“Are you kidding?” Sophie swatted playfully at my shoulder; her deep brown eyes, eyelashes thick and long, were as comforting as her hug. “I’m the terrible friend. I shouldn’t just call and text. I need to show up. I say that all the time to the kids in my classroom, show up for people, and then . . .” Sophie stopped midsentence and hugged me again. “Your usual?”
“Huh?”
Sophie turned to the barista and ordered for me. “Half-caf latte with almond milk,” Sophie said. “Now sit,” she ordered. “Talk to me for five minutes. Tell me how you’re doing.”
I sank into an iron chair across the café table from my friend. “I’m okay. I guess.”
“What can I do?” Sophie wiped the table with a napkin.
“It’s been over a year, Sophie. I can’t keep thinking people need to do anything. But I’d love to take a long walk with you, or go to a movie, or something. Now tell me about your life.”
“It’s been crazy but okay. You heard about my brother, right?”
“No.”
“He took off for Nashville, seeking fame and fortune as a country singer.” Her deep laugh echoed across the tables and others turned. She reached forward, the six bangles she wore on her wrist jangling like wind chimes. “I guess if Darius Rucker can turn from Hootie into a Black country music star, so can my brother.”
“He’ll make it,” I said. “He’s that good.”
And then we were off, talking about local gossip and discussing friends we both knew. I asked about her students; Sophie’s African American heritage led her to study and teach the history at SCAD. When the latte arrived, I stood to go. “Off to the museum.”
“Wait. What? Your sister told me you would never work there again.”
“When did you start listening to my sister?”
We laughed and said good-bye before I headed the six blocks to the museum, sipping coffee until I reached the last drop and stood in front of the Rivers and Seas Museum of Savannah. I turned my back to the marble stairs and red front door to gaze out at the city. Was there a prettier place? It wasn’t that I’d never traveled; I had. I’d been on European vacations as an adolescent with Mom and Papa. Later, for school and work I’d been on trips up and down the East Coast to learn of the nation’s history. But not once, except for a brief moment in Ireland, had I thought there was a city more mystical and beautiful than Savannah.
I wouldn’t accept this job with Oliver out of some sort of meant-to-be like Mom believed. I didn’t put my money on those concepts anymore; those were ideas spouted by people who had never experienced a rupture in their well-planned lives. But this project would absorb my hours and my mind for as long as it took.
The museum’s battered but beautiful old building with its brightly lit rooms held as many memories of Mora (and then Oliver) as anywhere else. We’d worked together on every special exhibit they’d done over the past five years—the ships of the Revolutionary War; the pollution of the great rivers of Georgia; the history of the SS Savannah—Oliver the director, Mora the head curator while I was the guest curator.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted to do this work anymore, but simply that I felt unsteady near Oliver. The three of us had known each other as intimately as family. We could read a thought on a face. I knew they would get engaged a week before he asked; a subtle shift in him had told me.
“If one wants to move beyond the past, one must not delve into the past,” some out-of-date advice book once told me. But no one, even if they believe they have, moves past the past. It follows; it shadows; it breathes quietly in the dark corners. Ask me, I know.
I set my hand to the brass doorknob and opened it to a dusty dimness. The lights were off and the front desk empty where their most loyal volunteer, Mrs. Farmly, usually sat with her gray bobbed hairdo and cheery greetings for anyone who wandered in from the street.
I walked through the room of ship models and stopped before a five-foot-long, to-scale model of the Pulaski steamship. I crouched low and stared through the glass. Two replica lifeboats hung above the decks and two more on the deck. Only four. Ropes hung across the double masts and down to the bow. Wooden settees were fixed to the deck along the railings, facing seaward, and the wheelhouse was displayed as a tiny dollhouse in the middle. I’d never paid the model much attention, at least not the minute details. I could rattle off the names of every ship featured in the museum, both models and paintings, but had I really looked?
I wandered down the back hallway to climb the creaky stairs, past a display of the family whose home this had been during the Civil War, a family that had watched the Union general, William Tecumseh Sherman, march down the broad street and capture the city. I reached a closed door: Dr. Oliver Samford—Director stated the brass label. Hand-carved trim made to resemble a ship’s rope surrounded the doorframe. I turned the knob and went in unannounced.
Oliver sat behind a desk, his back straight, staring straight ahead as if someone stood in front of him. The desktop was organized in neat piles of papers and folders.
“Good morning,” he said in a too-cheery voice. “Have a seat.” He motioned to the empty chair in front of his desk. My favorite yellow lined legal pad and a felt-tip pen lay ready for me. “I assumed you already stopped for coffee so I didn’t pour you any.”
I looked behind me and then back to Oliver. “Are you expecting someone?”
“You.” He removed his black-rimmed reading glasses. “I’m expecting you.”
“Am I that predictable?”
“No. But one can hope.” He flashed the grin that went all the way up to the corners of his eyes.
“What is all this?” I sat and put my hands on the desk, palms down.
“You first. Tell me why you’re here.”
“If you knew I was coming, you tell me.” Irritation scratched at my throat.
“I have no idea what you’ve decided. I just knew you would come.”
I tented my fingers and leaned forward. “Oliver, I will curate this Pulaski exhibit. If it is the Pulaski. If it’s not, I’m leaving. That is the deal I’ve made with myself and the one I will make with you. I want you to pay me well—I want to buy my rental. I have only one more class before summer break, then I can focus on curating an exhibit. And yes, I admit you know me well. A shipwreck. Lost treasure. Unknown stories. They’re all my siren calls. You knew what I’d say.”
He grinned again. “I do know you. Just the word ‘shipwreck’ and we’re off and running.”
“Did you know that Mora is here . . . was here . . . because of a shipwreck?”
“What?” He laughed and stood to come to my side, leaned back with his palms on the desk. “Tell me.”
“She was Irish and the Irish arrived here in Savannah because of a shipwreck. An entire ship of indentured Irish servants was headed north when a storm blew it off track and it wrecked off the Georgia coast. Of the hundred passengers, only forty survived. Oglethorpe bought their indentures for five pounds apiece and Mora’s ancestors went off to plantations to work. With that one storm, that one wreck, Irish immigration in this region was forever altered.” I paused. “Mora and I loved that story. We would pretend to be marooned on the shores of Savannah while handsome British men saved us from sure death by shark attack.”
“She never told me that one. You two had quite the imaginations.”
“We did.”
Oliver and I were silent for longer than was comfortable, Oliver looking down at me and I up at him. I finally glanced away and placed my hand on the folder. “This is the proof?”
“It is indeed.”
“Loads of steamships went down in those waters. We know that.”
“But the wreck was found where the Pulaski exploded and sank.” He picked up the folder. “These are the files and photos and information from Endeavor Exploration, the group that does the work with another salvage company called Deep Water Ventures. I have it all here. Now let’s get started.” A chair screeched across the floor as Oliver slid it over to me, took a seat and opened the first folder. “I’m going to put you in touch with the head of the dive, Maddox Wagner. He can tell you everything they know so far.”
I attempted to keep my face placid, but the stories hidden in history, narratives discovered through artifacts and letters, buried beneath the muck and murk of the ocean’s silt and sand, were irresistible to me.
Oliver sat back in his chair. “Why don’t you take all this home and let me know what you find. There isn’t a lot written about this wreck—only a few articles, as far as we know. What does exist is right here in Savannah, at the Georgia Historical Society. I suspect local families have papers you’ll want to dig up.”
I opened the folder to see a list of names. “What’s this?”
“An incomplete manifest. It lists some of the passengers, the workers, the servants, the captain, first mate, et cetera.”
I studied the sheet of paper. Female passengers didn’t have first names unless they were children; otherwise they were listed as “missus” or “miss” with a last name only. Enslaved people didn’t have names at all.
Oliver moved closer, tapped another folder. “These are photos of the remains of the wreck taken by Maddox Wagner.”
They were pictures underwater, of a watery place that had enchanted me all my life. A world unseen. The universe viewed only by the bravest divers and sojourners. Mortals had to live with secondary accounts. As a child, I’d pretended to be a mermaid and a Selkie. To be born in a bathtub was one thing, but to be born of the ocean seemed the most mystical of any fate.
Oliver continued as I turned the pages. “Maddox’s discoveries will make you want to dive down there with him.”
I leafed through the images one by one: coins; a comb; a collection of glass bottles; a candlestick; a luggage tag; a key. I came to the last photo. A hundred feet below the surface, thirty miles off the coast of North Carolina, inside a wreck a hundred and eighty years old, beneath silt that had flowed up from the camera’s lens, rested a tiny, crusty statue of Poseidon, his face covered in algae and the right arm broken off at the elbow, robbing him of his trident.
My breath caught in a moment’s remembrance of who I once was—a woman obsessed with the sea’s mythology, with its goddesses and gods. The ocean was enigmatic, but this time she was offering me her lost secrets.
Papa had said, “Only the sea knows, and she keeps her secrets well.”
I glanced again at the photo of the iron luggage tag. “I wonder if the person this belonged to, who put it in their bag that morning, survived.” I looked up. “How many lived?”
He slipped out a piece of paper. “We don’t have a full manifest, but this is what we do have. It’s only a few names so . . . to discover the rest is part of your job.” He stood. “Come with me. I want to tell you a story.”
We wandered back to the room of ship models and Oliver stood between The Steamboat Pulaski and a model of a slave ship, the Wanderer, only a few feet away. He spread his arms wide between the two, almost touching the protective glass surrounding them both.
He cleared his throat and in his best storytelling voice he began. “In June 1838, this steamboat—now known as the Southern Titanic—headed out to sea for a quick trip to Baltimore. The advertisement stated: Only One Night at Sea. But on its way, it blew up.” He pointed at the four replica lifeboats. “With only four lifeboats—the ones hanging are called quarterboats and the boats uncovered on the deck are yawls.”
“I know this part.”
He ignored me. “And this ship”—he pointed at the Wanderer—“set out to sea twenty years later in 1858, under the pretense of being a luxury yacht, flying the pennant of the New York Harbor Yacht Club. Instead it sailed to Africa and picked up over four hundred Africans as human cargo to be brought back to Georgia to be enslaved.”
“It’s horrific,” I said. “I know that story, too.”
“Not the whole story. Not the story behind the story.”
I laughed despite my very best attempt to keep a straight face. He knew that the words “the story behind the story” were as good as a drug to me. “And?”
He turned his attention back to the Pulaski. “That morning of June 13, 1838, the famous Savannah plantation owner, banker and ship financier Lamar Longstreet boarded with his wife, their six children, his sister, and his niece with her husband, baby and nursemaid. He had helped to both finance and oversee the building of the beautiful ship. He was there to show off his achievement, display his confidence in the ship and take his family north for the summer.” Oliver stood silent for a dramatic breath, and I leaned forward, almost touching him.
“Deep in the night, a terrible explosion occurred and within forty-five minutes the ship sank. Passengers were cast into the sea and drowned. Lamar Longstreet’s oldest son, Charles, fourteen years old, acted with heroic courage on that horrendous night and during the days surviving at sea that followed. For his actions he was dubbed ‘the Noble Boy.’”
“So he survived?”
“Yes, he survived . . . only to become the man they called ‘the Red Devil.’” Oliver now turned to the Wanderer and set his hand on top of the plexiglass. “Charles Longstreet refitted this pleasure schooner and fooled the country so he could illegally bring to Savannah from the African Congo human cargo of over four hundred men, women and children. He was known to be both relentless and cruel. He was also part of the Fire-Eaters group, rabble-rousers agitating for a civil war.”
“Unbelievable,” I said. “A young boy survives the sinking of the Pulaski as a hero and becomes a terror called the Red Devil?”
“And Lilly Forsyth was his cousin.”
“The fabled Lilly is the Red Devil’s cousin? This is curiouser and curiouser.” Oliver laughed at my quoting Alice in Wonderland. “Did anyone else survive from this family?” I counted on my fingers. “This family of what? Twelve from one family, including Lilly, her husband and her baby. Thirteen was her nursemaid. Did anyone survive other than Charles?” I crouched down and stared into the model of the Pulaski, and asked, “What the hell happened that night?”
Oliver’s suppressed smile gave away the line he knew would be the final bait. “Go find out for us.”