He did not inquire after Meg, or ask why my wife had permitted me to travel all this way by myself. He did not ask about Alice or Amelia.
I thought of Mama, how much she would have loved having two little granddaughters in this house. It was alway
s too quiet in here. I remembered one of her favorite expressions: “The silence in here is so loud, I can hear my own heart rattling around in my ribs.”
Judge Corbett looked me up and down. “Where is your baggage?” he asked.
“I’m not staying here,” I said. “I’ve taken a room down at Maybelle Wilson’s. Actually, I’m here on business for the government. I have to check out some candidates for the federal courts.”
I could have sworn this news made him wince, but he recovered quickly enough.
“Fine,” he said. “Be about your business. Maybelle’s should suit you perfectly. Is there something else?”
I saw no reason to prolong this agony. “Oh, no. Nothing. It was pleasant to see you again.”
He waved for Dabney to ladle more soup into his bowl. He dabbed at his lips with a starched linen napkin. Then he deigned to speak.
“We should arrange another visit sometime,” my father said. “Perhaps in another six years.”
Chapter 25
“YOU NEED SOMETHING for your belly, Mr. Corbett?” May-belle called in a loud voice from the front parlor of her rooming house.
I had found the Slide Inn Café all closed up for the night, but still I declined Maybelle’s invitation. “No, thank you, ma’am. I’m all taken care of.”
“Just as well. Ain’t nothin’ in there but some old pone.”
Maybelle’s had never been known for luxury. In fact, the only thing the place was ever known for was a string of slightly disreputable boarders through the years. Now, I supposed, I was one of them.
The original Maybelle had died years ago, about the time the house was last given a fresh coat of paint. But Eudora tradition dictated that any woman who ran the place was referred to as “Maybelle.”
Occasionally a shoe salesman or cotton broker spent a night or two at Maybelle’s. Once or twice a year my father commandeered the place to sequester jurors during a trial. And there were, inevitably, rumors about women of uncertain morality using the rooms for “business.”
A monk would have felt at home in my room: a narrow iron bed, a small oaken desk with a perilous wobble, and an equally wobbly cane-backed chair. On the bureau were an enameled-steel bowl and pitcher. And under the bed, a chamber pot for those times you didn’t want to make the trip to the outhouse.
In the corner of the room was one small window, which somehow managed to admit all the hot air from outside during the day and to hold it inside all night.
I stripped down to my Roxford skivvies and positioned the chair directly in front of that window. I suspected there was no breeze to be had in town that night. Luckily, my room was provided with the latest advance in cooling technology: a squared-off cardboard fan with the inscription “Hargitay’s Mortuary Parlor, The Light of Memphis.”
A lonely man sitting with his bare feet propped up on a windowsill, waving a funeral fan at his face.
Welcome home, Ben.
Chapter 26
IT WAS TOO DAMN HOT for sleeping. I figured I might as well do some detective work in my room.
I had put aside two newspapers from the collection of “lynching reviews” I’d brought from Memphis. Now was as good a time as any for reading.
These particular articles were of special interest. From the pages of the Jackson Courier, they told the stories of lynchings that had taken place right here in Eudora, and within the past three years.
I unfolded the first paper:
Word of an horrific death by strangulation reached our office this morning. By the time this reporter visited the alleged scene, no trace of said hanging was evident, save for a bloodied rope tossed aside in a pile of swamp grass.
The unanswered questions were obvious. Who told “this reporter” that the death was “horrific”? Why was he so careful to use the word “alleged”?
I picked up the other newspaper.