Each student was identified by a nickname: Sweet Thang for Abby, Professor for Douglass, Criss Kross for Cedrick, Broomstraw for skinny Sheriff Mike. It was time to leave for her lunch date, but Faye wanted copies of this photo and of the individual portraits of each kid. She’d already gleaned all the information she needed, but the part of her that had grown up and grown cold wanted to document these children’s last spasm of innocence. Abby would be dead before the summer was over.
On her way to the copier, she found a picture of Wally, who had been a strangely solemn-looking eleventh-grader that year. Flipping through the rest of the yearbook, she found Senator Cyril in the fourth grade. He’d been a hollow-eyed boy, small for his ten years, wearing a dress shirt so small that its collar button wouldn’t button.
His nose had been broken and a long ragged scar angled between his right brow and his hairline. A permanent front tooth was missing. It was not a face of privilege. He must have blessed the day he scared up enough money to get a nose job. Her opinion of the senator rose. It would be worth the effort to get to know anybody who could rise above a beginning like this.
Bahia grass waved V-shaped seedheads in the muggy breeze. Faye inhaled its scent, like bread baking in the oven of a Florida noon. She was glad that the city of Panacea couldn’t afford to mow this park on a regular basis. She liked its weedy, seedy ambiance.
There was a new sign standing among the weeds, impressive and expensive, marking the entrance to Panacea Mineral Springs Park. It was a monument to the governmental tendency to earmark plenty of money for capital expenditures and none for maintenance. Faye considered it a poetic place to bring a politician. She wondered how Cyril would like it.
Intrepid visitors who passed the fancy sign quickly found their cars jouncing over a rutted dirt road past aged brick and wooden pavilions on the brink of collapse. On her first visit to this park, Faye, being who she was, had hopped out of her car to see how old they were. She found that the pavilions were a century old and that they were never meant for picnickers; they were built to shelter invalids. Under each of the half-dozen roofs festered a stagnant pool of water, the remnants of a natural spring. These springs had lured the infirm here to dangle their weak legs into cold, healing waters.
At some point the water level had dropped or the springs had silted up, leaving nothing but murky holes—except for one. Walking over the grounds on that first visit, Faye had found a foot-wide hole where water bubbled out of the earth, still clear and still cold. The spring spilled into a creek skirting the park and, after passing through a culvert under Highway 98, flowed directly into the salt marshes buffering the little town of Panacea from the great Gulf of Mexico. Dipping her hand in the pure water, she finally understood why some fool had called the place Panacea, Greek for “cure all,” a place-name that Faye considered as fate-tempting as calling a place Paradise or Shangri-La.
While Faye waited for Cyril, she sat happily at a picnic table and did nothing but just love the place. Even when he came into sight, she had to wait awhile for his white Lexus to bump slowly down the dirt driveway toward her. She hoped the potholes wouldn’t harm Cyril’s fancy car. When they had discussed this picnic, she knew he was thinking of a place more private and he’d been a good sport to go along with her warped sense of a good time. It was true that they had the small park to themselves, but the whine and swish of traffic on Highway 98 was everpresent. Faye’s experiences with men had not given her a trusting soul. Yet here she was, playing with fire again. She welcomed the traffic noise and its constant reminder of nearby humanity, in case this date took a disastrous turn. Help was only a couple hundred feet away.
Would Cyril understand her affection for this park and its ruins? Would he be fascinated by the old mineral baths or repelled by the slime lining their walls? Would he be interested in the brick pavilion in the back that was sliding into the creek? Or would he be bored by the whole thing? Perhaps Faye was setting up too many tests for a first date, but she wasn’t a woman with time to waste.
He unfolded his big frame from the driver’s seat and flashed her an easy wave without checking his car for mud or scratches. Good. Then he reached in the passenger window and pulled out two Styrofoam food boxes.
Instead of “Hello,” he said, “Barbecued ribs. Cole slaw—the good kind with lots of onions. Hushpuppies. And French-fried sweet potatoes. I hope you like it. It’s what I always get when I’m in this neck of the woods.”
Faye, who at the age of five had been labeled “Little Miss Standoffish” by her grandmother, heard herself say, “Anybody carrying food that good can come right over here and sit down by me.”
The pine branches over their heads filtered out most of the sun and a sea breeze kicked up, taking the edge off the fact that both the temperature and the relative humidity had topped ninety. Faye was fairly comfortable, but Cyril was used to air conditioning. Suggesting an outdoor lunch in August was yet another test of Cyril’s mettle.
After the initial food-related conversation—“Would you like salt and pepper?” “Is the tea sweet?”—ebbed, she said, “I’m glad you dressed for the weather. You would have died out here in a business suit.”
Cyril glanced down at his madras shirt and tennis shorts and said, “The heat just keeps my sweet potatoes hot. People who can’t adapt to the circumstances heaven throws their way don’t get far in this world.” He began to chuckle. “I’m having a vision of some of my esteemed fellow senators sitting at this table with us, keeling over one by one because they don’t have sense enough to take off their suit coats and loosen their ties.”
Faye lifted her tea and said, “A toast to your overheated colleagues,” and Cyril lifted his. The Styrofoam gave an unsatisfying tap as the cups clicked, but they drank deeply anyway.
Faye said, “I can stand a powerful lot of heat if I have a good supply of iced tea.”
Cyril nodded. “This is just the way I like it. Strong and sweet.” After a sip, he added, “I bet that’s how you like your men.”
While his observation may have been accurate, Faye elected to sip her own tea without comment.
“I’ve got some aides looking into your claim to the Last Isles,” Cyril said.
She had purposely avoided speaking of her legal problems. She would put Cyril through a gauntlet of tests before she was willing to date him; she would not base her decision on his ability to grant political favors. The idea of going out with him simply because of his clout had a whorish odor to it.
“What do your aides say?” she asked in a voice so studiedly casual that a bystander would have thought she had no more interest in regaining her family’s lands than she did in daytime television.
“They think it’s unlikely that we’ll find evidence of property ownership so strong and so unequivocal that the courts will be willing to take the land back from a half-dozen owners—including the federal government—and give it to you.”
Faye nibbled on her last hushpuppy and tried not to look crushed.
“But,” Cyril said in a warm tone that made her feel a bit more hopeful, “race will continue to be a confounding issue in American politics for a couple more generations. If you’re willing to live through the hoo-ha that will ensue when the press gets ahold of this…well, you know they’ll love this story. A lone black woman fights the courts for her rights and loses to a bunch of cheating white men and a crooked judge then, seventy years later, her great-granddaughter demands justice. The government might give you some part of your land back just to shut the media up. It could work, Faye.”
Not being someone whose private life could stand a media frenzy, Faye mumbled, “I’ll think about it,” and rose from her bench. Tossing her lunch trash into a bin, she ambled over to the one remaining clear-running spring, slipped off her sandals, and plunged her feet into the water. Cyril, passing his third test—or was it his fourth?—slid off his deck shoes and dipped his own bare feet.
They sat together, enjoying the contrast between their heat-addled heads and their icy-cool feet. Neither one spoke and it was okay. Faye figured that the ability to be companionably silent was important in a man and gave Cyril credit for passing a test she hadn’t planned.
Why had her relationships with men been so uniformly abysmal? She liked men, even preferred their company to that of women, but her romances had always followed the same crash-and-burn trajectory.
In high school, she’d been a quiet, bookish girl who attracted exactly no male attention until, at sixteen, she suddenly and unexpectedly became pretty. Her grandmother had observed at the time that it was better to bloom late than never to bloom at all. In retrospect, Faye wasn’t so sure Grandma knew what she was talking about.
Oh, it had been exciting, trying to decide whether she’d had more fun at the drive-in with Mark or the beach with Cary and worrying over whether Sammy knew she was also going out with Jon. Her sudden popularity with the boys did not equate to popularity among her female classmates, but Faye hardly noticed. She’d spent her childhood largely without friends, because God had seen fit to distribute racist ignorance evenhandedly. The white girls considered her black and shunned her accordingly, but the black girls, who twenty years before would have fawned over her creamy skin, rejected her as too white simply as a matter of black pride. Even from a distance of more than fifteen years, Faye couldn’t blame her teenage self for flaunting every conquest in the other girls’ faces.
Then, in May, it was over. The phone stopped ringing. No crowd of admirers waited at her locker after school. One day, instead of finding Sammy and Jon and Mark and Cary standing beside her locker, she found a circle of girls discussing their prom dates. The names Sammy and Jon and Mark and Cary were mentioned often and loudly.
Faye must have flinched as she stooped to twirl her combination lock. The hyenas smelled weakness and closed around her.
“Got a prom date, Faye?” asked a big-haired cheerleader. “Didn’t think so. Wanna know why not?”
Being only a junior, Faye didn’t rate an upper locker. Retrieving her books would have required kneeling before the predators and she refused to do it, so she turned and faced them.
“Going to the prom means having both sets of proud parents gush on about what a beautiful couple you make. It means having your picture made. Can you imagine anybody’s parents being proud to have your picture on the mantel?”
Through her tears, Faye focused on the cheerleader’s mouth and its vulgar ring of orangey-brown lipstick. It was spewing venom, but it was also speaking the truth. She had noticed that her dates were all white. Jon, who was more scholarly than the usual high school boy, had pronounced her looks exotic, while Sammy, who couldn’t have been more average, had said she looked like Cleopatra.
She had known they were attracted to her because she was different. In that moment, she realized that none of the boys had ever introduced her to his mother. And none of them ever would.
Faye relived that moment for about the eighty-thousandth time, staring at her brown toes as the springwater washed over them. She looked over at Cyril, who was gazing at the creek running clear under its overhanging trees, and realized that she hadn’t dated a white man since she was sixteen years old.
He saw her look at him and he said, “Did you know that the woods back there are full of springs and all of them feed this creek? Lord, I used to enjoy wading here, catching minnows and just generally having a redneck good time.”
“You grew up around here?” she asked, knowing the answer.
“Yeah, until I was eleven.” Something cast a shadow on his face. “That’s when Mama and I went to Alabama and never came back. It was a brave thing she did, leaving Daddy, but she never quit being scared of him. Nobody could know where we were. She was adamant about that, even to the point of home-schooling me, and it worked. Daddy never found us.”
“Did you have brothers or sisters?” Faye asked, oddly shamed that she knew this answer, too. All she had done was look at a few pictures in an old yearbook. Why did she feel like a voyeur?
“My older brother Cedrick stayed behind to finish high school. We heard he went to work in the oil fields. Mama did the right thing. Daddy was a mean man. I believe she saved our lives, but I still wish I knew where my brother was.”
A breeze kicked up and spoiled the moment by riffling Cyril’s hair back off his temples, revealing a fine white scar running along his hairline. Faye’s heart gave a little skip at the thought of a damaged child making such good repair, not just of his psyche but of wounds to his body, although it argued a degree of vanity, of self-absorption that she found unseemly, particularly in a man.
To Faye, cosmetic surgery bordered on self-mutilation. She would never forget barging into the bathroom at her fiancé’s house and surprising his mother, who was changing the bandages covering her recent nose job.
Embarrassed and nauseated, she had confessed her
faux pas
to her fiancé. “Isaiah, my roommate had her nose done and it wasn’t anything like that. The surgeon worked from the inside and there were no scars at all.”
Isaiah had stammered a moment before saying, “Well, Mama’s a special case. She wanted him to narrow her nose and reduce the nostrils and—”
“And make her nose less African? More Caucasian?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.” Isaiah hesitated. “See, Mama wants to be pretty and she thinks a few little scars are a small price to pay. Everybody’s not lucky enough to look like you do.”
Faye wished she’d been woman enough to break up with him on the spot, but she’d let the relationship rock on for another six months. Every time they went out in public, she watched for signs that he saw her as a light-skinned trophy who would be good for his career. They were all too visible. And when they were alone, she couldn’t forget that this man thought his mama would be prettier with somebody else’s nose.
A year after they broke up, she saw him at a nightclub with a sharp-featured trophy on his arm and telltale scars on his new nose. That was when she decided that it was time to move to Joyeuse full-time. Living among people was making her very tired.
So why was she sitting here next to this man fifteen years older than she was, a man she hardly knew? She’d been brought up to value family above all else, yet she had none. The loss of her mother and grandmother was an open wound. They would have wanted her to marry, to have children. She herself wanted a baby badly, probably more than she wanted a man. “You’ve got to go out to get asked out,” Mama had always said.
Well, Mama, here I am
, Faye offered, in the way of someone whose prayers were directed as much to her departed loved ones as they were to God.
She looked at Cyril sidewise. He was a nice-looking man, whatever his age—tall, rugged features, light tan, fine but still-thick hair without much gray. She catalogued his good qualities, most of which she had uncovered through her series of tests. He wasn’t too snobbish to enjoy a picnic in a rundown park. His intellectual interest could be piqued by something as esoteric as the crumbling ruins of a third-rate resort. He was tough enough to withstand an August noon in Florida. He was capable of friendly silence. He revered his mother’s memory. He liked barbecued ribs and good iced tea. And he seemed to like her.