The Chamber (Page 74)

"You see the third house on the right, the little brown one there?"

"Yes."

"That’s where you lived. We could walk down there but I see people moving about."

Two small children played with toy guns in the front yard and someone was swinging on the narrow front porch. It was a square house, small, neat, perfect for a young couple having babies.

Adam had been almost three when Eddie and Evelyn disappeared, and as he stood on the corner he tried desperately to remember something about the house. He couldn’t.

"It was painted white back then, and of course the trees were smaller. Eddie rented it from a local real estate agent."

"Was it nice?"

"Nice enough. They hadn’t been married long. They were just kids with a new child. Eddie worked in an auto parts store, then he worked for the state highway department. Then he took another job."

"Sounds familiar."

"Evelyn worked part-time in a jewelry store on the square. I think they were happy. She was not from here, you know, and so she didn’t know a lot of people. They kept to themselves."

They walked by the house and one of the children aimed an orange machine gun at Adam. There were no memories of the place to be evoked at that moment. He smiled at the child and looked away. They were soon on another street with the square in sight.

Lee was suddenly a tour guide and historian.

The Yankees had burned Clanton in 1863, the bastards, and after the war, General Clanton, a Confederate hero whose family owned the county, returned, with only one leg, the other one lost somewhere on the battlefield at Shiloh, and designed the new courthouse and the streets around it. His original drawings were on the wall upstairs in the courthouse. He wanted lots of shade so he planted oaks in perfect rows around the new courthouse. He was a man of vision who could see the small town rising from the ashes and prospering, so he designed the streets in an exact square around the courthouse common. They had walked by the great man’s grave, she said, just a moment ago, and she would show it to him later.

There was a struggling mall north of town and a row of discount supermarkets to the east, but the people of Ford County still enjoyed shopping around the square on Saturday morning, she explained as they strolled along the sidewalk next to Washington Street. Traffic was slow and the pedestrians were even slower. The buildings were old and adjoining, filled with lawyers and insurance agents, banks and cafes, hardware stores and dress shops. The sidewalk was covered with canopies, awnings, and verandas from the offices and stores. Creaky fans hung low and spun sluggishly. They stopped in front of an ancient pharmacy, and Lee removed her sunglasses. "This was a hangout," she explained. "There was a soda fountain in the back with a jukebox and racks of comic books. You could buy an enormous cherry sundae for a nickel, and it took hours to eat it. It took even longer if the boys were here."

Like something from a movie, Adam thought. They stopped in front of a hardware store, and for some reason examined the shovels and hoes and rakes leaning against the window. Lee looked at the battered double doors, opened and held in place by bricks, and thought of something from her childhood. But she kept it to herself.

They crossed the street, hand in hand, and passed a group of old men whittling wood and chewing tobacco around the war memorial. She nodded at a statue and informed him quietly that this was General Clanton, with both legs. The courthouse was not open for business on Saturdays. They bought colas from a machine outside and sipped them in a gazebo on the front lawn. She told the story of the most famous trial in the history of Ford County, the murder trial of Carl Lee Hailey in 1984. He was a black man who shot and killed two rednecks who’d raped his little daughter. There were marches and protests by blacks on one side and Klansmen on the other, and the National Guard actually camped out here, around the courthouse, to keep the peace. Lee had driven down from Memphis one day to watch the spectacle. He was acquitted by an all-white jury.

Adam remembered the trial. He’d been a junior at Pepperdine, and had followed it in the papers because it was happening in the town of his birth.

When she was a child, entertainment was scarce, and trials were always well attended. Sam had brought her and Eddie here once to watch the trial of a man accused of killing a hunting dog. He was found guilty and spent a year in prison. The county was split -the city folks were against the conviction for such a lowly crime, while the country folks placed a higher value on good beagles. Sam had been particularly happy to see the man sent away.

Lee wanted to show him something. They walked around the courthouse to the rear door where two water fountains stood ten feet apart. Neither had been used in years. One had been for whites, the other for blacks. She remembered the story of Rosia Alfie Gatewood, Miss Allie as she was known, the first black person to drink from the white fountain and escape without injury. Not long after that, the water lines were disconnected.

They found a table in a crowded cafe known simply as The Tea Shoppe, on the west side of the square. She told stories, all of them pleasant and most of them funny, as they ate BLT’s and french fries. She kept her sunglasses on, and Adam caught her watching the people.

They left Clanton after lunch, and after a leisurely walk back to the cemetery. Adam drove, and Lee pointed this way and that until they were on a county highway running through small, neat farms with cows grazing the hillsides. They passed occasional pockets of white trash – dilapidated double-wide trailers with junk cars strewn about – and they passed run-down shotgun houses still inhabited by poor blacks. But the hilly countryside was pretty, for the most part, and the day was beautiful.

She pointed again, and they turned onto a smaller, paved road that snaked its way deeper into the sticks. They finally stopped in front of an abandoned white frame house with weeds shooting from the porch and ivy swarming into the windows. It was fifty yards from the road, and the gravel drive leading to it was gullied and impassable. The front lawn was overgrown with Johnsongrass and cocklebur. The mailbox was barely visible in the ditch beside the road.

"The Cayhall estate," she mumbled, and they sat for a long time in the car and looked at the sad little house.

"What happened to it?" Adam finally asked.

"Oh, it was a good house. Didn’t have much of a chance, though. The people were a disappointment." She slowly removed her sunglasses and wiped her eyes. "I lived here for eighteen years, and I couldn’t wait to leave it."

"Why is it abandoned?"

She took a deep breath, and tried to arrange the story. "I think it was paid for many years ago, but Daddy mortgaged it to pay the lawyers for his last trial. He, of course, never came home again, and at some point the bank foreclosed. There are eighty acres around it, and everything was lost. I haven’t been back here since the foreclosure. I asked Phelps to buy it, and he said no. I couldn’t blame him. I really didn’t want to own it myself. I heard later from some friends here that it was rented several times, and I guess eventually abandoned. I didn’t know if the house was still standing."

"What happened to the personal belongings?"

"The day before the foreclosure, the bank allowed me to go in and box up anything I wanted. I saved some things – photo albums, keepsakes, yearbooks, Bibles, some of Mother’s valuables. They’re in storage in Memphis."

"I’d like to see them."

"The furniture was not worth saving, not a decent piece of anything. My mother was dead, my brother had just committed suicide, and my father had just been sent to death row, and I was not in the mood to keep a lot of memorabilia. It was a horrible experience, going through that dirty little house and trying to salvage objects that might one day bring a smile. Hell, I wanted to burn everything. Almost did."