Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Okay.

I can understand why Malachi mistook her for me after all the time that had passed since I'd last seen him. And that is as kind to the dead as I'm prepared to be.

Malachi watched me walk towards him, his babbling face revealing nothing beyond his blubbering triumph. I should have stayed back. I should have let him live with the illusion of his victory, but in all likelihood he would have learned of his error anyway. I don't believe it would have made any difference, and now that he was safely restrained, I was angry.

Astounded and angry. Genuinely, blindly seething.

"Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord," he mumbled, his vigor faltering as he studied me. "Vengeance is . . ." He stopped. He twisted his head around to see the crowd that had grown around the body up on stage. "Oh. Oh, I didn't. She's not." His forehead settled atop his eyes, narrowing them into a fierce glower that should have frightened me more than it did. "God will forgive me," he said firmly. "He will forgive me because He understood my intent. He judges us according to the light that we have. And His vengeance will be satisfied yet. He will forgive me, Avery."

I squatted before him, my leather pants creaking at the knees. "You'd better hope so, cousin." I smiled, showing all my teeth, and then I patted his cheek with the back of my hand. He recoiled as far as his captors would allow, which wasn't much.

I almost stood with surprise, but I stayed down close to him. How strange—and yet not. It should have occurred to me long before. He was as afraid of me (or at least of whoever he thought I was) as I had been of him. With one long, vindictive fingernail I scratched a fine white line down the side of his face. I leaned in close and put my mouth near his ear, like Jamie had done to me. "Strike two," I whispered.

Then I rose to my feet and stepped away, back into the crowd.

More than one person had commandeered a napkin and was already scrawling the next slam's badly eulogizing tribute poetry. I retreated from the rest of the poets as well. My wine buzz was blown and I couldn't stand their company for another moment. Jamie waved his arms like he wanted my attention, but I pretended not to see him as I made for the back exit.

Outside, sirens with red-and-blue lights flashed the arrival of police cars, or an ambulance, or both. The paramedics were too late for Terry, who had quit bleeding and would be quite stiff before long; and the police were too late for me, because whatever wrong I'd committed was at least a lifetime past. They could take Malachi back to jail for his bungled stabs at justice, but whatever provoked him would escape his wrath so long as I had anything to do with it.

I was actually starting to believe it.

I was parked out back, which I only remembered when I nearly tripped over my car. Good. I didn't want to talk to the police either. They'd probably come for me later, when they found out what Malachi had been up to, but I wasn't ready for them yet. I needed some time to pull myself together. My hands clenched the steering wheel to keep from shaking. I hate being scared. I hate it. And even worse, I hate feeling guilty . . . especially when I don't have anything to feel guilty about. Or so I told myself.

I took my time getting home. On my way back up the mountain I stopped in north Chattanooga, halfheartedly poking around to see if I could stumble across Pine Breeze. I didn't find it; I didn't even find the cemetery with a duck pond that was supposed to mark the turnoff. I was thinking harder than I was looking.

Avery.

Dave said he thought my father's name was Allen, or Andrew, or something like that. Was it Avery, instead? Once I'd gone through Lu's high school yearbooks seeking out a likely candidate. My mother had been sent to Pine Breeze by the time school pictures were taken, so I didn't find anything of her—but in her class I thought perhaps I'd find the mysterious Allen or Andrew. Naturally, I found more than a couple Allens or Andrews. I painstakingly searched each black-and-white photograph for some hint of my own features, but I did this without reward. Not one of them was any more likely than another to have been my sire.

But had there been any Averys? I couldn't recall. Perhaps I should look again.

Finally feeling a little more centered—or at least less rattled—I gave up wandering the rabbit warren of roads that comprise the north-side neighborhoods and returned home.

Lulu was waiting for me at the door. Her body was haloed by the television light flickering in the living room. She was not happy.

"Jamie called to see if you made it home okay. He told me what happened at the slam."

"Oh." Well, at least I didn't have to tell her about it. I wasn't sure how I would have explained it anyway.

Lulu and I faced off on the porch. "You could have at least called to say you were all right," she said.

I shrugged. "I didn't know Jamie would call. I didn't know that dumbass would tell you about it. I didn't see any reason to worry you."

"Where you been? You left there an hour and a half ago. What've you been doing all this time?"

I shrugged again, like I always do when I don't know what to say. I do it when the truth isn't likely to be enough. "Driving around."

"Your dumbass friend said you talked to the gunman for a minute. He said he thought maybe you knew him somehow. Tell me, then, was it Malachi?"

"Yeah. It was him."

"What did you say to him?" she asked, closing the door behind her and shutting us both outside. "What did he say to you?"

So this was it—just me and her. I didn't get Dave for backup, and neither did she. All shields down. Unless I wanted to waste more of the night with the nervous shakes, I'd have to fire the first shot. "I don't see why I should tell you. You never tell me anything."

She held me in her gaze like a frogsticker with a flashlight. The challenge had been delivered. I couldn't tell if she was annoyed or impressed. She's hard to read. "What you want to know?"

Might as well start with the big one. "Who's my father?"

At least she wasn't surprised. She must have been expecting it for years. "Don't know. We didn't even know Leslie was pregnant when Momma sent her into that place."

"You must have known she was seeing somebody. She was your baby sister. You must have known there was someone up her skirt. Damn, Lulu, she must have been a couple of months along when you sent her in—the newspaper said she was only there for six. Come on, who was it?"

If she was surprised that I'd gotten hold of the old clippings, she didn't show it. "I told you. I don't know."

"Was it Avery?"

"No." The word flew out of her mouth without hesitation. "It wasn't him."

"Then who was he? Why does Malachi think I've got something to do with him?"

"Because he's crazy. He's crazy and he doesn't know shit."

"Now you're lying."

"Don't you call me a liar."

"Then you tell me the truth."

"Okay, the truth is it doesn't matter about Avery. He's been dead generations before you were born. And the rest of what I said was the truth. Malachi's a crazy little fuck stick to think you're Avery come back, and that's all there is to it."

"Then what harm would it be to tell me about Avery if it really don't matter? Maybe the police will let me talk to Malachi, and he'll fill me in," I bluffed.

"You won't really do that," she said, but I could tell she wasn't so sure. Her hand reached for the porch rail and her lips tightened. She was holding something back.

"Maybe I will, and maybe I won't. But I tell you what—I might."

Lulu was torn. She walked away from the door and sat down heavily in the wooden porch swing. The chains squealed reluctantly, rhythmically, as she rocked on her heels and the swing began to sway. She didn't look at me for a few seconds, maybe a minute or more. She was working something out, deciding how much to give up and how much to keep. Every sentence was a trade-off, and I wished to God I knew what she was playing to keep. But when she raised her eyes to me I knew she was giving up the round . . . at least as much as Lulu ever gives anything up. At least I'd gotten her into a mood where she was more willing to talk, and that was something new.

"Okay, then," she breathed. "You're right. Sit down beside me. You've not had a bedtime story in longer than I could say."

IV

"What year did they fight part of the Civil War here in the valley? What year was the Battle Above the Clouds, like old white people like to call it—you know, when they fought on Lookout Mountain? When was that?"

"I don't know," I admitted, joining her on the porch swing and kicking it into back-and-forth motion with the back of my heel.

Lulu dropped one of her toes and pressed it against the ground, slowing the sway but not stopping it altogether. "I don't know either," she said. "So I don't know exactly when this started, then. We'll say 1860-something. That's close enough. My great-great-grandmother was a house nigger named Lissie. She worked for the Porter family, who had a big house at the foot of Lookout—not too far from the thick of the fighting. The Porters had fled down into the valley when the shooting started, but they wanted some of their things from the house if they could save them, so they sent Lissie and her brother out after them.

"When they got there they found the place wasn't too bad off, so they started gathering up some of what had been left behind. Then Lissie heard someone calling for help out back. A shot-up Northern soldier had gotten separated from his fellows. He wasn't dying yet, but he wasn't in good shape either, and as regular as this city changed hands in those days, his position wasn't exactly secure. As the story goes, Lissie and her brother took him inside and hid him in the basement. Her brother took what he could carry and went back to the Porters, telling them his sister had been taken off by the Yankees—and let me tell you, they would have believed those Yankees were capable of almost anything, so they didn't try very hard to disbelieve him. Lissie stayed in the basement and nursed the soldier back to health enough to make it back to camp a few days later. When the war was over, his unit went back up North, and when the family got back home, Lissie was pregnant. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">