Wildwood Creek (33 page)

A
LLIE
A
UGUST
, P
RESENT
D
AY

I
t was the stillness that seemed so out of place. No dogs barking, no horseshoes grinding against the caliche gravel street, no wagon wheels and harness hames singing their long, lonesome tunes. No voices, no clanging pots, not even the snap of drying clothes flapping in the wind. Just silence. Like the quiet of a graveyard on a day when no funerals or visits have been planned.

A hundred stories whispering, but none you could hear. You have to
know
the stories to hear them after the people are gone. Wildwood, it seemed, would always be a graveyard with no one to tell its tale. I felt guilty about leaving it this way, even though our time here was up. The cameras had been dismantled, the fiber-optic cables pulled. Up the hill, semitrucks and heavy construction equipment were already rolling in to move away the crew trailers.

Yet there was a part of me that still couldn’t accept the
mystery. I didn’t want to leave Bonnie Rose behind, just a bit of legend and lace, part woman, part myth. I had imagined her escape from this valley a thousand different ways since Blake had shown me the photo of her. Dreamed of it, even.

Maybe this was how she would have wanted it, after all. No ties to bind her to this place, other than a song no one could even remember all the words to anymore. Mallory had tracked down bits and pieces, but even the old-timers in these hills no longer sang “The Ballad of Wildwood.”

Standing in the schoolhouse for the last time, I listened for the air to whisper it, but it wasn’t there. Even so, I couldn’t help lingering, just looking, just thinking.

I wasn’t the only one. Around the village, there had been a fair bit of lingering, as we closed down these temporary lives we’d lived. After three months of investing ourselves here, of living this life, it was difficult to just walk away. Several winners had amassed small fortunes in gold, but it was still hardest to leave behind homesteads that had become homes, gardens that had grown to produce table food, livestock that had become like part of the family. An existence you build with your sweat and your hopes and your hunger doesn’t just go away instantly. Tears were bound to be part of the process. I had shed quite a few of my own. More than I’d ever thought I would.

But I was looking forward to Blue Bell ice cream and Dr. Pepper. Preferably combined . . . in an air-conditioned room.

Still, I hoped I would never really leave Wildwood behind. I hoped to carry it with me wherever I went. One day, maybe Blake and I would sit around a table somewhere, sharing a wild story of how we met and found a strange connection to the famous sprint horse Wildwood Rose. I pictured telling the story at holiday dinners and class reunions, places where one tale led to another and another and another until
a whopper was generated and everybody wondered if it could really be true.

There was so much to think about between here and there. So many choices life offered, including those tucked inside a folder of reference letters and scholarship information for the University of Southern California. “Rav has already spoken to a contact for you,” Tova had said when she gave me the folder along with my final review. “You’ve done quality work this summer, Allison. I must admit, I may have somewhat underestimated you. But a job well done is the best reward, isn’t it?”

Then she handed over the folder, and that was that. No hugs. No shared smiles. No cheers at the prospect of our leaving the wilderness. Just the faintest hint of an uptick in the corners of her lips before she turned away. And three little words:
Don’t lose touch.

Now, standing in the schoolhouse, I looked at the folder and it almost seemed surreal. My ticket to the future. The golden ticket. It had finally happened. The thing I had hoped and prayed for all these years had finally been just . . . handed to me. But like so many answered prayers, it had come with the knowledge that I had stored up my treasure in the wrong place. The important thing isn’t proving you can achieve a goal, but living every moment along the way, even the side trips.

Perhaps, especially the side trips.

“Regrets?”

I turned to find Rav Singh in the doorway, his profile eerily familiar in the fading afternoon light.

“None,” I said, holding up the folder. “Thank you for this. Tova told me what you did, making a contact at USC for me.”

“Top-rated film school, and we support a number of endowments there.” He moved a few steps further in the door.
“You seem surprised. I am a man of my word, and that was our bargain.”

Bracing his hands on his hips, he looked up into the rafters, and suddenly I had a feeling he was lingering here for the same reason I was. It’s hard to create an imaginary world and then say good-bye to it. Maybe it never got easier no matter how long you were in the business.

“No regrets at all, then?” He seemed to be challenging me, to know why I made it all sound too simple. “Yet you’re still here, and up the hill the buses are leaving.”

“I’m riding back to Austin with Blake. I wanted to stop in Moses Lake and thank the fishermen who helped find Kim and me. They probably saved our lives.” That small portion of the summer was still so hard to think about. I’d done my best to push it from my mind, but the reality of it waited in the outside world. Stewart’s trial still lay ahead. More time in small white rooms with investigators and lawyers and FBI agents. But Kim and I had made a pact we would get through this together, and neither of us would give Stewart any more than he had already taken. What he had done wouldn’t change the way we lived the rest of our lives. “I guess I wish I’d been a better judge of people—that I’d picked up on Stewart before things happened the way they did. That’s a regret.”

“Some of our best moments are born of the worst.” The statement came out of the blue, seeming strangely sentimental for Rav Singh. “In film, and in life, the highest point arrives just after the lowest.”

I gaped at him, slightly stunned. He was comparing what Kim and I had been through to plot points in a film? Sometimes I wondered if he had any concept of reality—of the fact that the people in these shows had to go home, process, and deal with not only the experiences they’d had, but the fact that millions of people would now share in the carefully
edited perception of it. Life would never be quite the same for any of us.

Seemingly unaware of the whirl of my thoughts, he slipped something from behind his back. An antique book of some sort. “This was apprehended in a package to you earlier in the summer and kept in the holding area. As you know, all incoming packages were checked for materials not appropriate to our time period. This copy of
Jane Eyre
was carrying a bit of cargo—not so cleverly hidden, I might add.”

“Stewart’s package?” My throat tightened, a heaviness settling on my chest.

Rav nodded, extending the book my way, urging me to take it. “Yes, but strangely enough, this one came bearing gifts . . . beyond the slightly mutilated reprint of
Jane Eyre
.”

I forced myself to take it, to lay it in my palm and look at the cover.

“Open it.”

I took a breath, flipped open the cover, felt something shift deep inside the pages. They parted slightly near the center of the book, and I slid a thumb in, laying the spine flat and exposing a cutout section with something small and silver inside. Electronics of some sort. “What is it?”

“A recording. Something he must have discovered while researching for you.” He stood back, clasped his hands behind himself, and smiled at the book, seeming pleased. “As I said, you’ll find in life, Allie, that the pattern of struggle and triumph is so often tightly interwoven. And what we each must decide for ourselves eventually is, are they random, or is there a weaver at work? It is, in fact, the great mystery that underlies all the smaller ones.”

“I’ve already decided.” I knew it was true. This summer had changed me in ways I never thought it could.

“I leave you to your final discovery in Wildwood, then.”
He went out the door, stopping on the porch to survey the village and breathe in the stillness before descending the steps and disappearing.

I sat down in one of the pews, trying to work up the courage to push the button. I was still there, staring off into space when Blake came looking for me. And then I knew: That was what I’d been waiting for. I’d been waiting for him to come.

“Stewart sent this over the summer. They had it at the mail lockup. He wanted me to listen to it.”

Blake’s eyes narrowed warily. “Do you need me to take care of it?”

“No.” But I handed it to him anyway. “I guess I want you to push the button and just sit here with me.”

Outside, a mourning dove called as Blake slipped into the seat beside me. “I can do that.” His arm circled my shoulders and pulled me in close, sheltering me in that safe place I had come to both trust and rely on. I laid my head on his shoulder, and he kissed my hair, then pushed the button. “Here goes.”

Whatever happened now, I knew I wouldn’t be alone.

At first there was only static, the scraping sound of a needle on an old phonograph.

“The Slave Narratives.” An announcer’s deep voice pressed through the static of the recording. “As recorded in December 1938, by extension of the Federal Writer’s Project under the authority of the Works Progress Administration and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

Outside, the mourning dove stilled its call, as if it were pausing to listen too.

I closed my eyes, let the stress seep away as a breeze combed the live oaks, causing their branches to softly stroke the roof overhead. The scents of water, stone, and growing things wound through me. Timeless scents, the very ones that would have surrounded Bonnie Rose, here in this place.

I felt her nearby, listening with me, waiting for a voice to press its way through the static again, to insist on being heard after these endless years of silence. Finally, they came. Words, steeped in the hum of background noise, slowly floating to the surface like the leaves in a cup of tea, ready to be skimmed up.

The interviewer spoke first, and within the first few words, I suddenly understood that like everything else that had happened since my coming to Wildwood, this moment, too, had been sent with a lesson to teach.

Interviewer: “This is the slave narrative of Essie Jane Porter. Session two.

“
Essie, thank you for joining me today to share more of your personal story. As you know, our purpose is to record the living history of slavery before it disappears. Can you tell us your age at the time of this recording?”

Essie Jane Porter (laughing): “You done as’ me that yes’aday. But I ain’t ’shamed to tell it again. I seen ninety-one-and-a-half year in this world. Long time.”

Interviewer: “Thank you, Essie Jane. That’s no small feat for anyone to achieve. Yesterday, you told us of your young childhood on the Blevins Plantation in Lousiana. I wonder if, today, you could share more about your adult life? For instance, when and how did you leave your parents’ home? Where did you go after that? Where were you when the conflicts that eventually led to the Civil War began, and what were you told about those events as they were happening?”

Essie Jane Porter: “I’z thirteen year old when hard time hit on the Blevin Plantation. Cotton come in bad, and Lou’siana gone into secession, and Massah figure they gone be some fightin’ fo’ too long, so he take us down to town and sell off the las’ three a’ us they is. That be me, my mama, and Big Neb. After that, Big Neb and me, we owned by a man name
Delevan. We ain’t never seen the man, but we told we goin’ to be his. I’z scared that day, I don’t mind to say.

“I guess tha’s when I become a big girl, thirteen year old but a woman now, all-same. End up sent to work on the
New Ila
steamboat, owned by Massah Delevan. Big Neb, he frightened like a little chil’, ’cause he don’ swim. The first mate on the boat, he take one look at Big Neb, and he tell him, ‘You give me any trouble, I throw you in the watah, and you be drown dead.’ So Big Neb work loadin’ and unloadin’ that boat, and I work down b’low, seein’ after the passenger-folk with the cook women and cleanin’ up they messes in they staterooms.

“Now, the
New Ila
, she a beautiful thing, but the first mate, he ain’t a good man. He known fo’ usin’ the women slaves hisself, and the cap’n don’ know one thing ’bout it. You don’ dare tell nobody, neither. You find yo’self slit throat and dump in the river, and they jus’ say you jump off and run away. That the first time I see how mean life can be. My mama kep’ a lot of that off me, back home.

“It on that boat, I meet a woman gone change all they is about me. Firs’ time I see Miss Bonnie Rose, I think, she got the face of a angel, and hair like fire, long and curly and red, down far as her waist. But she ’bout scared as me. She try to hide it, but I can see. She scared to death a’ them fine folk on the boat. Scared to death a’ everythin’.

“Cap’n, he noticed she beautiful too. He start keepin’ a eye on her. Tell me, ‘Essie Jane, you watch aft’a her special.’ I didn’ know Cap’n knowed my name even, befo’ that.

“So I do what he say, and it Miss Bonnie what gets that first mate t’rowed clear off the
New Ila
. I’z glad that day, and Big Neb too. Figure we can work for Cap’n jus’ fine. But when that boat get where it been goin’, I fin’ out we ain’t travlin’ back with it. I ain’t never gon’ see my mama again. I got no way to know how to follow them rivers all a’ way back
home, even if I was to run away. Big Neb, he gon’ to be with me though, so I jus’ little less afraid, but still, I wonder how it gon’ to be, this place we goin’, call Wildwood.

“Bonnie Rose, she goin’ too, and her lil’ sister, Maggie May. Cap’n, he tell Big Neb n’ me, ‘You look after Bonnie Rose. If’n trouble come in Wildwood, you get me a message with the freighter, Missah Hardwick.’ He don’ want no bad to hap’n to Miss Bonnie. He in love wit’ her by then, I figure, but she don’ have nothin’ to do wit’ all that. Don’ trust it. She got secrets she keepin’.