The White Road

“You’re up,” I said. I began to pull the fifty back, but her hand slapped down upon the edge.

“He didn’t come in this morning. Last couple of mornings neither.”

“So I gather. Where is he?”

“He has a place in town.”

“He hasn’t been back there in days. I need more than that.”

The bartender a

“He got hisself a place up by the Congaree. There’s some private land in the reserve. That’s where he’s at.”

“Where exactly?”

“You want me to draw you a map? I can’t tell you, but there ain’t but one stretch of private left in the park.”

I released the fifty.

“Next time, I don’t care how much money you bring, I ain’t talking to you. I’d be better earning two dollars from those sorry motherfuckers than a thousand selling out good people to you. But you can take this for free: you ain’t the only one bein’ askin’ about Tereus. Couple of guys came in yesterday, but Willie gave them the bum’s rush, called them fucking Nazis.”

I nodded my thanks.

“And I still liked them better than you,” she added.

With that she walked to the stage, the CD player behind the bar knocking out the first bars of “Love Child.” She had palmed the fifty.

Obviously, she pla

Phil Poveda was sitting at his kitchen table that night, two cups of cold coffee still lying untouched close by, when the door opened behind him and he heard the padding of feet. He raised his head, and the lights danced in his eyes. He turned around in his chair.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The hook was poised above his head, and he recalled, in his final moments, Christ’s words to Peter and Andrew by the Sea of Galilee:

I will make you fishers of men.

Poveda’s lips trembled as he spoke his last words.

“This won’t hurt, will it?”

And the hook descended.

23

I DROVE IN silence to Columbia. There was no music in the car. I seemed to drift along I-26, northwest through Dorchester, Orangeburg, and Calhoun counties, the lights of the cars that passed me in the darkness like flights of fireflies moving in parallel, slowly fading into the distance or lost to the twists and bends of the road.

And everywhere there were trees, and in the blackness beyond their margins the land brooded. How could it not? It had been tainted by its own history, enriched by the bodies of the dead that lay beneath the leaves and the rocks: British and Colonial, Confederate and Union, slave and freeman, the possessor and the possessed. Go north, to York and Lancaster counties, and there were trails once traversed by the night riders, their horses galloping through dirt and water, white-draped, mud-speckled, the riders urging them on, terrorizing, a

And the blood of the dead ran into the earth and clouded the rivers, flowing from the mountain forests of poplar, red maple, and flowering dogwood, the sculpin and dace absorbing it into their system as it passed through their gills; and the river otters that plucked them from the water gulped them down, and the blood with them. It was in the mayflies and stoneflies that darkened the air of the Piedmont Shoals, in the black-sided darters that anchored themselves to the bottom of ponds to avoid being eaten, in the sunfish that hovered near the safety of the spider lilies, the beauty of their white flowers masking their ugly, arachnoid underparts.

Here, on these silt-loaded waters, the sunlight moves in strange patterns, independent of the flow of the river or the demands of the breeze. These are the shiners, the small, silvery fish that blend with the light reflecting off the surface of the stream, dazzling predators into seeing the shoal as one single entity, one enormous, threatening life-form. These swamps are their safe haven, although the old blood had found its way even into them.

(And is that why you stayed here, Tereus? Is that why the little apartment contained so few traces of your existence? For you don’t exist in the city, not as you truly are. In the city you’re just another ex-con, another poor man cleaning up after those wealthier than himself, witnessing their appetites while quietly praying to your God for their salvation. But that’s just a front, isn’t it? The reality of you is very different. The reality of you is out here, in the swamps, with whatever you’ve been hiding for all these years. It’s you. You’re hunting them down, aren’t you, punishing them for what they did so long ago? This is your place. You discovered what they did and you decided to make them pay. But then jail got in the way-although, even in that, you were making somebody pay for his sins-and you had to wait to continue your work. I don’t blame you. I don’t think any man could look upon what those creatures had done and not want to punish them in any way possible. But that’s not true justice, Tereus, because by doing what you’re doing, the truth of what they did-Mobley and Poveda, Larousse and Truett, Elliot and Foster-will never be revealed, and without that truth, without that revelation, there can be no justice achieved.

And what of Maria

So you have to be stopped, and the story of what took place in the Congaree told at last, because otherwise the woman with the scaled skin will continue wandering through the cypress and holly, a figure glimpsed in the shadows but never truly seen, hoping to find at last her lost sister and hold her close, cleansing the blood and filth from her, the misery and humiliation, the shame and the pain and the hurt.)

The swamps: I was passing close by them now. I drifted for a moment and felt the car cleave to one side, crossing the hard shoulder, jolting against the uneven ground, until I found myself back on the road. The swamps are a safety valve: they soak up the floodwater, keep the rains and the sediment from affecting the coastal plains. But the rivers still flow through them and the traces of the blood still linger. They are with them when the waters reach the coastal plain, there when they enter the black water, there when the flow of the salt marshes begins to slow, and there at last when they disappear into the sea: a whole land, a whole ocean, tainted by blood. One single act, its ramifications felt throughout all of nature; and so a world can be changed, ineffably altered, by a single death.

Flames: the light of the fires set by the night riders; the burning houses, the smoldering crops. The sound of the horses as they begin to smell the smoke and panic, their riders wrenching at the reins to hold them, to keep their eyes from the flames. But when they turn there are pits set in the ground before them, dark holes with black water in their depths, and more flames emerge, pillars of fire shooting up from the interco

Richland County: the Congaree River flowed to the north, and I was floating above the road, carried ever onward, my momentum determined by my surroundings. I was moving toward Columbia, toward the northwest, toward a reckoning, but I could think of nothing but the girl on the ground, her jaw detached, her eyes already emptying of consciousness.

Finish her.

She blinks.

Finish her.

I am no longer of myself.

Finish her.