“Mary Randolph didn’t show up at the Beergarden dance, so she didn’t hear me play saxophone in public for the first time. I didn’t expect her, either, not after the way she looked out at the warehouse. There’d been a lot of news about Eddie Grimes, who they made out to be less civilized than a gorilla, a crazy man who’d murder anyone as long as he could kill all the white women first. The paper had a picture of what they called Grimes’ ‘lair,’ with busted furniture all over the place and holes in the walls, but they never explained that it was the police tore it up and made it look that way.
“The other thing people got suddenly all hot about was The Backs. Seems the place was even worse than everybody thought. Seems white girls besides Eleanore Monday had been taken out there—according to some, there was even white girls living out there, along with a lot of bad coloreds. The place was a nest of vice, Sodom and Gomorrah. Two days before the town council was supposed to discuss the problem, a gang of white men went out there with guns and clubs and torches and burned every shack in The Backs clear down to the ground. While they were there, they didn’t see a single soul, white, colored, male, female, damned or saved. Everybody who lived in The Backs had skedaddled. And the funny thing was, long as The Backs had existed right outside of Woodland, no one in Woodland could recollect the name of anyone who had ever lived there. They couldn’t even recall the name of anyone who had ever gone there, except for Eddie Grimes. In fact, after the place got burned down, it appeared that it must have been a sin just to say its name, because no one ever mentioned it. You’d think men so fine and moral as to burn down The Backs would be willing to take the credit, but none ever did.
“You could think they must have wanted to get rid of some things out there. Or wanted real bad to forget about things out there. One thing I thought, Dr. Garland and the man I saw leaving that shack had been out there with torches.
“But maybe I didn’t know anything at all. Two weeks later, a couple things happened that shook me good.
“The first one happened three nights before Thanksgiving. I was hurrying home, a little bit late. Nobody else on the street, everybody inside either sitting down to dinner or getting ready for it. When I got to Mary Randolph’s house, some kind of noise coming from inside stopped me. What I thought was, it sounded exactly like somebody trying to scream while someone else was holding a hand over their mouth. Well, that was plain foolish, wasn’t it? How did I know what that would sound like? I moved along a step or two, and then I heard it again. Could be anything, I told myself. Mary Randolph didn’t like me too much, anyway. She wouldn’t be partial to my knocking on her door. Best thing I could do was get out. Which was what I did. Just went home to supper and forgot about it.
“Until the next day, anyhow, when a friend of Mary’s walked in her front door and found her lying dead with her throat cut and a knife in her hand. A cut of fatback, we heard, had boiled away to cinders on her stove. I didn’t tell anybody about what I heard the night before. Too scared. I couldn’t do anything but wait to see what the police did.
“To the police, it was all real clear. Mary killed herself, plain and simple.
“When our minister went across town to ask why a lady who intended to commit suicide had bothered to start cooking her supper, the chief told him that a female bent on killing herself probably didn’t care what happened to the food on her stove. Then I suppose Mary Randolph nearly managed to cut her own head off, said the minister. A female in despair possesses a godawful strength, said the chief. And asked, wouldn’t she have screamed if she’d been attacked? And added, couldn’t it be that maybe this female here had secrets in her life connected to the late savage murderer named Eddie Grimes? We might all be better off if these secrets get buried with your Mary Randolph, said the chief. I’m sure you understand me, Reverend. And yes, the Reverend did understand, he surely did. So Mary Randolph got laid away in the cemetery, and nobody ever said her name again. She was put away out of mind, like The Backs.
“The second thing that shook me up and proved to me that I didn’t know anything, that I was no better than a blind dog, happened on Thanksgiving day. My daddy played piano in church, and on special days, we played our instruments along with the gospel songs. I got to church early with the rest of my family, and we practiced with the choir. Afterwards, I went to fooling around outside until the people came, and saw a big car come up into the church parking lot. Must have been the biggest, fanciest car I’d ever seen. Miller’s Hill was written all over that vehicle. I couldn’t have told you why, but the sight of it made my heart stop. The front door opened, and out stepped a colored man in a fancy gray uniform with a smart cap. He didn’t so much as dirty his eyes by looking at me, or at the church, or at anything around him. He stepped around the front of the car and opened the rear door on my side. A young woman was in the passenger seat, and when she got out of the car, the sun fell on her blond hair and the little fur jacket she was wearing. I couldn’t see more than the top of her head, her shoulders under the jacket, and her legs. Then she straightened up, and her eyes lighted right on me. She smiled, but I couldn’t smile back. I couldn’t even begin to move.
“It was Abbey Montgomery, delivering baskets of food to our church, the way she did every Thanksgiving and Christmas. She looked older and thinner than the last time I’d seen her alive—older and thinner, but more than that, like there was no fun at all in her life anymore. She walked to the trunk of the car, and the driver opened it up, leaned in, and brought out a great big basket of food. He took into the church by the back way and came back for another one. Abbey Montgomery just stood still and watched him carry the baskets. She looked—she looked like she was just going through the motions, like going through the motions was all she was ever going to do from now on, and she knew it. Once she smiled at the driver, but the smile was so sad that the driver didn’t even try to smile back. When he was done, he closed the trunk and let her into the passenger seat, got behind the wheel, and drove away.
“I was thinking, Dee Sparks was right, she was alive all the time. Then I thought, No, Mary Randolph brought her back, too, like she did Eddie Grimes. But it didn’t work right, and only part of her came back.
“And that’s the whole thing, except that Abbey Montgomery didn’t deliver food to our church, that Christmas—she was traveling out of the country, with her aunt. And she didn’t bring food the next Thanksgiving, either, just sent her driver with the baskets. By that time, we didn’t expect her, because we’d already heard that, soon as she got back to town, Abbey Montgomery stopped leaving her house. That girl shut herself up and never came out. I heard from somebody who probably didn’t know any more than I did that she eventually got so she wouldn’t even leave her room. Five years later, she passed away. Twenty-six years old, and they said she looked to be at least fifty.”
4
Hat fell silent, and I sat with my pen ready over the notebook, waiting, for more. When I realized that he had finished, I asked, “What did she die of?”
“Nobody ever told me.”
“And nobody ever found who had killed Mary Randolph.”