American Ghost Read online

  She looked moderately peeved at the request, feeling for the zipper and working to zip it up. “Mrs. Lucas gave me this robe. She wears ’em everywhere—wears ’em to the grocery store.”

  “Yeah—and South Beach women wear bathing suits with the ass cut out of them, but I can’t handle that either. Just go get dressed, before the Old Man comes in. Please.”

  She exhaled a breath but went to the bedroom and shortly returned, dressed in a respectable church-girl cotton dress that closed in the front with a long row of pearl buttons. She was still buttoning it when she walked in the room, apparently trying to allay his fears about her father.

  “Don’t worry about Daddy. He’s not so rough once you get to know him—the nicest Hoyt around. Ask anyone. Especially a Hoyt.”

  She paused for a reply, but Sam had momentarily been silenced by the sight of her buttoning her dress with that intimate, casual femininity that affected him worse than the slip.

  He didn’t hear a word she said and blinked. “What?”

  “Daddy,” she repeated, her hands on her hips in a fetching kind of dominatrix pose. “He’s not that bad. He’s out in the shed—come on, I’ll introduce you.”

  “What’s he doing in the shed?” Sam asked, coming slowly to his feet.

  “That’s where he hangs out when he’s not doing his preacher duties, or running his debit.”

  “His what?”

  “His debit,” she explained in a tone of great patience as she went to the kitchen, moving the bubbling pots to the back of the stove. “He just preaches part-time. He’s also a policy man.”

  Sam’s expression turned to disbelief. “Your father is a bookie?” he breathed.

  “No. A policy man. He sells life insurance, burial policies—you know—to poor people, for a dollar or two a month, for death, dismemberment, whole life. He collects his debit twice a week, and it’s huge, from Wakulla to Wewa. He knows everybody—all the beekeepers and fishermen and old farmers who never go to town. That’s who you need to talk to, not the city people in Cleary. They’re idiots.”

  Sam was taken aback by the death and dismemberment and, in a slightly lowered voice, asked, “So is he gonna be all right? That I’m Jewish?”

  Jolie paused, pot holder in hand, and looked at him with great interest. “Is that what you are? Jewish?”

  “Yeah. Sure. What’d you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, returning to the stovetop. “Cuban, maybe Greek. Where’d you get the light eyes?”

  Sam was familiar with the term—yet another echo of Melungeon folklore, where light eyes and small feet were prized. “Couldn’t say. My grandfather was Lithuanian. Maybe a few Cossacks worked their way into the gene pool.”

  It was a common piece of smart-assery in Jewish circles, but taken as honest speculation by Jolie. “Huh,” she said as she finished with the pots and tossed the pot holder on the counter. “I didn’t know there were any Jews left in Miami. Mr. Lucas says the Haitians have taken over.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everybody says. But there are a few enclaves of the Hebrews left—trust me.”

  Jolie smiled, hand on the doorknob, and asked, “What’d y’all do? Take to the swamp and lie to the census men?”

  She said it with mischievousness so pointed it was finally, overtly seductive, as if she were offering her wit like a family secret, a sensual treat. The force of it made him stop in his tracks and stare at her with a strange foreboding, a gut certainty that this was a woman he’d love the rest of his life. The sureness of the thing was astounding, though he was an old hand at protective covering and answered lightly, without missing a beat, “Moved to Boca. Took to the condos.”

  “Oh, well.” She laughed. “Same difference, I guess.”

  Sam just blinked at her and agreed: same difference, he guessed.

  Chapter Five

  The shed that Jolie’s father used as a workshop was tucked away in a far corner of the churchyard, in what had once been a tobacco-drying barn, the kiln still intact, though the hooks were long removed. He’d reclaimed it from the foxes and the field mice in the bad years following his wife’s death when he’d needed a place to grieve in private, away from the eyes of his young children. Over the years, it had become his unofficial office and sanctuary, where he worked on his sermons, notes, and his unending, esoteric projects, which were eventually abandoned and packed away in man-high stacks of boxes that nearly filled the musty, windowless room.

  Jolie negotiated the maze with the ease of a favorite child, following a dim dirt path to an army-surplus desk in the corner, where the old man sat at his books, completely engrossed till Jolie was upon him.

  “Hey, Pops—supper’s almost ready. This is Sam—you know, Lena’s friend, from the campground?”

  The Old Man’s size had not been exaggerated—six-three or -four, with a girth that filled the small room, though he wore the sagging clothes and belt of a larger man. He was much older than Sam had expected, age and the stamp of poor health evident in his sagging jowls, and wheezing breath, though his preacher voice was trained to the old-school pulpit, and he fairly boomed his greeting as he struggled to come to his feet and present a plate-size hand. “Pleased to meetchu, young man.”

  Sam had braced himself for a distracting facial deformity, but the bad eye was nothing more than a small strabismus that made him appear to be thoughtful, whether he was looking at you or not. If anything, it made him more approachable, as flawed and welcome as his greeting, which was obviously sincere and open, but nearly impenetrable to Sam’s Miami ear. Not Southern as much as gibberish, a linguistic stew of colonial Anglo, African, Appalachian, and God knew what—maybe actual Mobilian, a Muskogean-based pidgin English that had once been widely used on the Gulf coast, now thought to be extinct.

  On Jolie’s urging, her dad immediately returned to his seat, with an apology. “Sorry. My laig’s been giving me a fit. Did Laner git off?”

  The question was directed at Sam, who listened hard, but could make little of it. He instinctively turned to Jolie, who’d hopped up to sit perched on the edge of the old desk, utterly at ease in the spidery gloom.

  “She’s all right,” she answered, “just a little homesick,” then got to the matter at hand. “Well, listen, Daddy—Sam was sent here to study the Indians, but nobody’ll talk to him. I was thinking you could take him on your debit and introduce him around. You know—out in the forest, and at church.”

  The Old Man turned an eye on Sam, and answered, not unkindly, “I didn’t know there was such a thang as Injuns in this forest.”

  “Sam says there are,” Jolie insisted. “He says the Hoyts aren’t Black Dutch at all, but just a bunch of old Hendrix gheechies, trying to pass for white. He’s working on an article for National Geographic. Wants to put you ’n’ Uncle Ott on the cover.”

  She grinned slyly as she said it, as this was the way the larger Hoyt family showed affection for people they loved, by teasing them mercilessly, trying to get their goat, it was commonly called. As one of the patriarchs of the clan, Raymond was used to abiding by its less commodious customs and paid her no mind, though Sam could feel his blood turn to ice water in his veins.

  “She’s joking,” Sam stammered. “I’m not a journalist, just a grad student, with the Museum of Natural History, working on an application the Creek made for state recognition. The Muskogee Creek,” he added in a final, desperate tag, hoping it might ring a bell of recognition.

  But the Old Man paid him about as much mind as he had his daughter (which is to say, none at all). He just murmured, “Well, I declare,” then relented with no further conversation, as if anxious to get back to his writing. “Well, surely—you can come with me, if you want. It’s a long drive, I’ll warn you thet. Don’t bother with a coat.”

  Sam caught enough of it to understand that the Old Man was extending an invitation and thanked him with great sincerity. Sam didn’t speak again till he and Jolie were far out of earshot, nearly to the porch, then
he turned and asked, “Why the hell did you tell him that bullshit about National Geographic? I can hardly find anyone who’ll talk to me now,” he fumed. “What’ll happen after that bullshit gets passed around?”

  He was so sincerely distressed that Jolie went to some lengths to reassure him, gripping the front of his shirt and telling him, “Sam, listen. You wanted Hendrix gheechie, and that’s what I just gave you: the King of the Hendrix Gheechies, Raymond Hoyt.”

  Sam was charmed by her sudden face-off, her close, teasing face that he decided was every bit as lovely as Lena’s, and even more: black hair, red lips, strange, moss-colored eyes. He lost his annoyance just like that and answered in a milder voice, “Well, I don’t really need low-country gheechie. I need Yuchi, Miccosukee, maybe a touch of Chacato.”

  Jolie just smiled a patient smile, as if she were dealing with a half-wit. “They call ’em gheechie around here, and don’t worry: the one thing they love to do is talk. You let ’em talk and they’ll tell you everything.”

  • • •

  So began a fast and fruitful ten weeks as far as Native American studies in North Florida was concerned, as Brother Hoyt was as good as his word about introducing Sam around on his debit, invariably as “a friend of Laner’s, up from My-amma, attending the university.”

  Apparently, Lena’s popularity knew no bounds, in the city nor the field, and Sam had Jolie on hand to soften the truly resistant (“Oh, he’s not a scientist—just some poor mook, trying to pay for college, just like the rest of us”) with a status-leveling nonchalance that was instinctive and, in someone so young, nothing short of brilliant. It was Sam’s first, far-off inkling of her genius in people-handling—a skill absorbed in babyhood in the complicated political mechanisms of a country church, which she was generous in sharing.

  On her advice, he went about unearthing local ethnicities in a more roundabout way, casually inquiring about details of their common folklore, folk remedies, and farm myths, asking if they were kin to any “granny-women”? This last was a loaded question, as it was the colloquial term for midwife, a profession half-blood women historically excelled in. Their extended families were quick to own up to such a relationship with a grandmother, or an aunt or a cousin, and with no encouragement at all would go on to describe in great detail their patented ways of treating the manifold complications of childbirth. They would recall with pride the names of the rich families in town who would send buggies out to get them in the old days because they trusted them more than any of them “high hats” in town. They had no idea how much of their cultural roots they were revealing with such stories, for granny-women were also practitioners of root medicine and a direct link to that vast subconscious ethnic heritage that these kinds of isolate communities both secretly celebrated and hotly denied.

  Sam soon amassed a quantity of data, the best of it from the Hoyt Diaspora, which stretched from south Alabama to the coast. There were originally nine Hoyt brothers, but only four still anchored locally: Ray, Earl, Ott, and Obie. Earl was the oldest—a bent octogenarian who suffered greatly from emphysema and seldom left the house; Obie, a widower with four sons; and Ott, the baby of the family and runt of the litter. He was plainly Jolie’s favorite, a lively little bachelor who’d survived rheumatic fever as a child and was about half the size of his older brothers, who treated her with the same delight her father did. He called her Jo-lee, Cajun-style, and practically ran to the door when he heard her call.

  She was obviously the family pet, and as long as she was at Sam’s side, he was warmly welcomed into listing, old trailers and houses so dilapidated they could truly be called shacks. Ott’s bedroom walls were lined in Depression-era newspapers for insulation—a common economy practiced by tenant farmers in the South, which Sam had read about, but had never seen in real life. Jolie seemed to take great enjoyment in sharing it with him, not intimidated by either her kin’s poverty or their deformities—mementos of their early years working as child labor in the area turpentine camps and sawmills. There were many cast eyes and lopped-off fingers, and an almost universal deafness that meant that Sam’s interviews were held at a dull roar, Jolie shouting right in their faces, “Uncle Ott! Tell Sam about the Hart Massacre! Where the soldiers smashed the babies’ heads against the STONES! Weren’t they buried up at WEEK’S ASSEMBLY?”

  After taking a moment to understand her, the old man would smile a dim smile and agree, “Yes’sam—up thar in Alabamer. Kilt the younguns, babies and all. Come up on ’em in the swamp, Mamer uster say . . . ,” with Sam scribbling furiously at his side.

  It made for much excitement in the discovery, and in only one way did Brother Hoyt continue to disappoint Sam: in his steadfast refusal to own up to his own Native American roots. These were obvious in every way: his strange pidgin English; his mystic strain of American fundamentalism; his straight hair, straighter nose, and Asian shovel teeth (all of them, including Jolie, passed the click test). Even after Sam legally traced them within the legal parameters of tribal membership to the Creek Census, Brother Hoyt was loath to acknowledge the connection and dismissed any promise of minority status.

  “Thet’s for people who need a laig up,” he argued. “We git by.” At breakfast one morning, he went so far as to trot out the famous old dodge, claiming that the Hoyts were Little Black Dutch.

  Sam was exasperated by his denial, and close enough by then to ask him point-blank, “Well, Brother Hoyt, tell me: What are the Little Black Dutch? Are they Dutch? Are they black? Are they even little?”

  The Old Man seemed not the least bit intimidated by this bald challenge; he just pointed a crooked finger across the table at Jolie and answered with calm assurance, “Thet girl right thar. Thet’s one.”

  Sam had burst out laughing, as he’d grown fond of the Old Man, who was a strange old bird by any reckoning, connected to the modern world by the thinnest thread, and in danger of exiting it prematurely thanks to a runaway case of diabetes and a bad heart. He was a gold mine of minutiae about Old Hendrix, and from their drives on the debit Sam gathered what meager information he could of his great-grandfather, and the exact location of Camp Six, where Brother Hoyt had, along with most in Hendrix, worked on and off as a young man, when all other paychecks had failed. “Nasty, hard day it made,” he said, “and I was always glad to be done.”

  Sam was careful to keep his cards close to his chest and went about his questioning with objective nonchalance, a full month into it before he got around to asking the Old Man about Sam’s own slender stake in local lore.

  “So Camp Six was basically a company town?” he asked as they threaded their way over the long bridge that spanned the river and floodplain outside town. “You bought your groceries on chits, at the store?”

  “If you had the credit. They could be particular.”

  “Who’s they? Who owned it?”

  “Lumber company,” the Old Man answered, “same as cut the swamp. Had mills here, ’n Louisiana, and Texas. Some of the folk was local. Same folk what owned the bank.”

  “Did they own the store? Was there local resentment? That people had to shop there?”

  It was a sweltering afternoon, the windows of the Old Man’s ancient, little Ford Falcon down, his elbow to the wind as he answered, of turpentine camps in general, and Camp Six in particular, “Naw—you didn’t have to buy thar. It was just convenient. Used to be, the riverboats brought thangs up to the landing. But the boats quit running, so they opened the sto, same as most camps.”

  “When did it close?” Sam asked, feeling for his notebook and jotting notes as always, his face to the open window.

  “Oh—’37, or ’8. Place got robbed, then was burnt. Old boy who worked there got shot in the face, in front of his wife and childrun.”

  Sam kept a carefully neutral face. “Who shot him?”

  The Old Man cast an inquisitive eye at him, as if surprised he hadn’t heard this locally famous story, though the Old Man made little of it and explained with the same drawled candor
he went at everything, “Colard feller—name of Kite. Over a pack of cigarettes, they say. Just come upon him and pow. Down he went.”

  Hearing the details of the family secret so casually recounted by a near first-source witness was affecting enough that Sam had to keep his face averted to maintain any semblance of distance, his voice dry and detached. “So, did you know him? Were you there?”

  “Naw. I wouldn’t have lived in camp if you’d a paid me. Usually stayed with kinfolk, working for ’em. And he wasn’t from around here—German feller.”

  “So what happened to him, after he was shot?” Sam pressed, meaning what had become of his body, though Brother Hoyt misunderstood.

  “He was graveyard dead. Dead before he hit the flo’.”

  “I mean, where they buried him.”

  “The German feller?” At Sam’s nod, he shook his head. “Couldn’t say. He wasn’t from around here,” he repeated in casual dismissal, then concluded with no trace of malice, “But old Kite swung for it. Buried him in Cleary. What was left of him.”

  He said it with a face of faint distaste that caught Sam’s attention, enough that he paused in his scribbling to ask, “Were you there? Did you see it?”

  The Old Man turned the full weight of his strange, unfocused eyes at him, but didn’t answer. He just regarded him speculatively a moment, then returned to the steaming autumn highway. “Now tobacco—it didn’t come on strong till later,” he began, changing the subject with no commentary at all, other than the weight of his eyes.

  • • •

  Sam pressed him no further, as it was but one conversation among many. He was still confident that he could track down the exact location of the store and Morris’s grave and took Jolie on many a stroll around forgotten and weed-choked cemeteries, pretending to search for the graves of the names on the Creek Census (and coming upon a couple quite by accident).

  She was well into her own fall semester by then, and when they were finished with their afternoon graveyard crawls, they’d return to the parsonage for supper, where Brother Hoyt was as generous with his table as he was his memories of Old Hendrix. He seemed not unaware that Sam’s interest toward her might be more than purely professional, but never made any inquiries into the matter. He just accepted Sam as part of the furniture around the parsonage, often on hand, with no threat attached. This very much annoyed the church Sisters, whose grievous loss of Lena had at least partially been compensated by Sam’s appearance soon after.