Darlene’s parents wouldn’t show up for the services—they probably wouldn’t show up for their own funerals. Her father, P. T. Randolph, had allowed various illnesses to go untreated—hypertension, cataracts, and rheumatoid arthritis, to name three. He claimed to do so in the name of religion, but everybody said that being saved meant less to him than saving money. He’d splurged on a wheelchair a few years back, but now he shared it with her mother, Desirée, who had thromboses in both legs and diabetes running rampant. According to Darlene’s brother, Gunther, whom they called GT, they barely left the sofa, let alone Lafayette. They didn’t have a car or a home phone anymore, and if they wouldn’t get a phone, they’d never pay for a bus. Besides which, he said, Mama panics if she even thinks about getting on a bus.
Surprisingly, LaVerne and Puma, who had cut Nat off for years, drove up from New Orleans for the service, but Puma kept grilling anybody who would listen: How do they know it’s him? They don’t really know! That ain’t my boy. Bethella avoided Puma, and later complained to Darlene about his disrespectfulness. As a rifle party fired off a three-volley military salute, Darlene could feel Puma’s eyes on her. His tortured expression seemed to set off each gunshot, all of them aimed at her heart. Then Nat’s parents turned on Darlene as if they suspected her of the murder, as if they knew about the Tylenol and the tight shoes. She overheard LaVerne say, He should’ve been buried in the Hardison plot. Darlene could see she would need to steer clear of them.
Family notwithstanding, people with earnest intentions did try to help Darlene as best they could over the next couple of years. Retail clerks, neighbors, social workers, a detective from San Francisco. She would remember that help from time to time, and the feeling would raise her mood slightly for a short period. The detectives eventually ruled out a large number of people and settled on a group of young hoodlums, possibly hired by an older set of hoodlums. They feared that they did not have enough evidence to guarantee a conviction, but they arrested them anyway, even though the district attorney could not get the trial moved to a more favorable location.
Without telling Darlene, Nat had taken out a modest life-insurance policy in addition to the store’s fire insurance. When she learned of this by mail she wept; she thought of each check she wrote afterward as a postcard he’d sent from beyond the grave. Darlene avoided spending much time in Ovis, buying buttermilk or ham hocks from other shops in nearby towns. She’d lost, along with the store, the heart to stack cans of baked beans on the shelves by herself or decorate the register with pictures of family members she could no longer face because of what she had done, and so she did not attempt to rebuild or reopen the store. Instead she hid under the fear that these insane freaks who felt they did not have to follow the law meant to return and finish the job. Sometimes she hoped that they would.
Bethella volunteered to take Eddie off her hands for a week immediately following the services, during the terrifying lull after Nat’s death when it began to seem that no one cared anymore except her, and during that time, the citified Negroes and Jewish lawyers of New York with their biblical names—Aaron and Abraham and Leah—came to Ovis and stayed for weeks in nearby motels and private homes, offering their services for free. Darlene refused to throw a party, but Eddie spent his sixth birthday playing in the backyard with several of the lawyers’ children. The lawyers interviewed her with earnest intensity, though she could not tell them much; took to the streets, though she would not; and shook their fists at the press, telling them everything they knew about justice and how it ought to work. But fist-shaking did not produce sufficient evidence for the justice system to feed on. Despite their tenacity, after more than a year with no results, they had to apologize and depart for good. Although the police found a tire print that matched the pickup of a certain kid and his friends, whom they rounded up, all other evidence had been incinerated, and they couldn’t produce a single witness. At the end of those many months the lawyers shook their heads and scribbled down emergency numbers on the backs of their business cards. The police promised to keep working on the case; they all seemed sincere. Then the lawyers went home to their city of origin, probably thinking about different legal cases that they could actually set right.
After they left, Darlene decided that she should independently collect whatever information she could to prove who murdered Nat, but the people who had done it had covered their tracks, chucked their murder weapons in places nobody had found, probably burned their bloody clothing. Nobody white in the town admitted to seeing anything untoward. Nobody white would take the word of anybody black. It seemed sometimes as if an imaginary store had burned down and an imaginary black man had lost his imaginary life inside it.