“Mrs. Booker?” I ask.
“Sho’ is. And you’re Dr. Cage’s boy. I can see it in your face.”
“Can you really?”
She nods. “You’ve got his eyes. Kind eyes. Dr. Cage was a true healer.”
“Thank you, ma’am. This is my friend, Serenity Butler. She’s a writer, too.”
“Is that right? Well, I can’t read no more, since my eyes gone bad. I used to take the Reader’s Digest. But ya’ll come on in. And please be patient. I can’t get around like I used to.”
The old lady stumps toward a battered La-Z-Boy recliner. “If any of my babies get in your way, just give ’em a shove with your foot.”
Only now do I realize the house is full of cats. Felines of all sizes occupy every horizontal surface. At least a dozen animals are perched on various pieces of furniture, and two sit atop an ancient Frigidaire visible through a door at the back of the front room. I smell at least one litterbox, but the house doesn’t actually stink, as I would have expected. Maybe Mrs. Booker spends what energy she has cleaning up after the cats rather than doing housework. I don’t relish the prospect of sitting on what looks like flea-infested upholstery, but I do. The cat in my chosen chair seems ambivalent about moving, but it finally surrenders and concedes its territory.
“The chil’ren ’round here call me the Cat Lady,” Mrs. Booker says. “You can see why. Nobody loves these babies but me. I don’t understand why. They don’t ask much from you, and they can just about take care of themselves. That’s what’s special about a cat. A dog’ll love anybody, but a cat’s love is a gift.”
I’m not sure how to start a conversation about a lynching, but Serenity takes care of that. She walks over to a photograph of a strapping man in blue overalls with a bandanna on his head and asks, “Is this your son, Mrs. Booker?”
The old lady laughs. “Lord no, that’s my husband, Lemuel.”
“He’s a handsome man.”
“Yes, indeed. Lem was a good man, too, but he’s gone more than forty years now. Got crushed by a log, loading a pulpwood truck. Chain broke.”
“I’m sorry,” I say automatically.
“My family were pulpwood cutters,” Serenity says. “Cutters, haulers, you name it, they did it. Bleeding for turpentine, if you go further back.”
Mrs. Booker has gone still. Then she squints at Serenity. “Is that right? Where you from, girl?”
“Up around Laurel. Longleaf pine country, back in the old days. All those old trees are long gone, though.”
“Sho’ is, baby. Long gone. And the men who cut ’em gone, too. Pulpwoodin’s a dangerous business, but that’s about all the work there is down in these woods for a black man. Or workin’ at the sawmill. White men do the proper loggin’ ’round here. Always have. Ya’ll push them cats out these chairs and set down. Tell me what you come to find out from the old Cat Lady. Lots of bad things happened ’round here back in my day. Nobody cares about that now, though. Nobody even remembers.”
“We care,” Serenity says. “Do you remember?”
The watery eyes close, and the lined face tightens with grief. “Oh, Lord, yes. I wish I didn’t. But I’ll never forget.” She nuzzles the chin of a thin calico with her foot. “You want to know about my real baby, Sam.”
“We do,” I tell her.
“That’s Samuel over there,” Mrs. Booker says, pointing to a framed photo on a table near the wall. Serenity goes over and looks at the photo, then picks it up and brings it to me. It shows a young man of about twenty holding a .22 rifle in one hand and a mess of squirrels by their tails in the other. Sam was thinner than his father, but just as handsome, and his eyes are bright with intelligence.
“That boy started putting food on the table when he was twelve years old,” Mrs. Booker informs us. “Take a seat, baby,” she says to Serenity. “Over here where I can see you.”
Serenity nudges an orange tomcat off an old club chair and perches on the edge of it.
“Have you two had happy lives?” Mrs. Booker asks, her eyes filled with concern.
“I suppose so,” I tell her, looking around the room. “I feel pretty lucky.”
The old woman smiles. “Have you seen bad things?”
Serenity and I share a quick glance.
“You can’t go through life without seeing some bad things,” I say. “Can you?”
“No, no. But I mean evil things. Because there is real evil in this world.” She turns to Serenity. “What about you, darling? You look too young to have seen much wickedness.”
“I fought in a war, Mrs. Booker. And I covered the crime beat in a lot of urban housing projects. I’ve seen some of the worst things people can do to other people.”
The old lady nods soberly. “Then you’ve seen him.”
“Who?”
“Him. The serpent of old.”
We share another uncomfortable glance. “If there is a devil,” Serenity says, “I’ve seen him all right. In every country in the world.”
The Cat Lady nods. “He can move anywhere, child, anytime. But at least I know I won’t be putting something in your mind that it can’t handle.”
I say, “Why don’t you tell us what happened to your son, Mrs. Booker?”
“He was killed by demons. White demons.”
“Do you mean the Ku Klux Klan?”
“No. The Klan wore white robes back then. These demons wore black. Black or green.”
Serenity cuts her eyes at me. She’s wondering whether Mrs. Booker is in full possession of her faculties.
“And this happened at the place people call the Bone Tree?”
The old woman crosses herself. “That’s the place. A pagan altar, that’s what it is. Ask any of the old folks down around that swamp. They’ll tell you.”
“Will you tell us what happened?”
The persistent calico jumps soundlessly into Mrs. Booker’s lap and settles there. The old woman sighs in surrender and scratches the animal between its ears.
“Sam was a hardworking boy,” she says. “Lots of ambition. He left Athens Point and moved north just as soon as he was old enough. He worked in Detroit, Michigan. Sam didn’t like being too far away from me, but work here was slow. After he’d had enough, he came back home. But he wasn’t alone. He had a woman with him. A wife, I should say. Dolores. We all called her Dee. Sam had married her up there. She was young and pretty, which was all fine and good. But she was also white, which wasn’t.”
This catches Serenity’s interest. “Your son married a white woman up north?”
“Well, I thought he had. And so did everybody else ’round here. Dee’s skin was so light, and her hair so straight, that she could pass, you know? Without even trying. Much lighter than you, baby. Up in Detroit, most people just treated her white, and she didn’t bother correcting them. Didn’t hurt nobody, did it? But Dee was proud of her family, and she didn’t mind saying she was black. Her daddy was black, and she loved him. Though I don’t think she quite knew what it was to be treated black. Not Mississippi black, you know?”