Every Dead Thing

“Mr. Parker’s an investigator, Walt. He used to be a detective,” said Alvin.

“I’m looking for someone, Mr. Tyler,” I began. “A woman. You probably remember her. Her name is Catherine Demeter. She’s Amy Demeter’s younger sister.”

“I knew you weren’t no writer. Alvin wouldn’t bring one o’ them”-he searched for the word-“leeches here.” He reached for his coffee and sipped long and quietly, as if to stop himself from saying more on the subject and, I thought, to give him time to consider what I had said. “I remember her, but she ain’t been back since her pappy died and that’s better’n ten years. She ain’t got no reason to come back here.”

That statement was taking on the sensation of an echo. “Still, I think she did, and I think it can only be co

I think it had been a long time since he had spoken of it aloud, yet I knew that no long period went by without him returning to it in his thoughts or without him being dimly or acutely aware of it, like an old ache that never fades but that is sometimes forgotten in the throes of some other activity and then returns in the forgetting. And I thought that each return had etched a line in his face, and so a once handsome man could lose his looks like a fine marble statue being slowly chipped away to a memory of its former self.

“I still hear her sometimes, y’know. Can hear her step on the porch at night, can hear her singing in the garden. At first, I used to run out when I heard her, not knowing but I was sleeping or waking. But I never saw her and after a while I stopped ru

Perhaps he saw something in my face, even in the slow-darkening evening, that led him to understand. I do not know for certain, and he gave no sign that he knew or that there was anything more between us than a need to know and a desire to tell, but he stopped for a moment in the telling and in that pause we all but touched, like two travelers who pass on a long, hard road and offer comfort to each other in the journey.

“She was my only child,” he continued. “She disappeared on the way back from town on a fall day and I never saw her alive again. Next I saw her, she was bone and paper and I didn’t know her. My wife-my late wife-she reported her missing to the police, but nobody came for a day or two and in that time we searched the fields and the houses and anywhere we could. We walked from door to door, knocking and asking, but nobody could tell us where she was or where she might have been. And then, three days after she went, a deputy came and arrested me and accused me of killing my child. They held me for two days, beat me, called me a rapist, an abuser of children, but I never said anything but what I knew to be true, and after a week they let me go. And my little girl never appeared.”

“What was her name, Mr. Tyler?”

“Her name was Etta Mae Tyler and she was nine years old.”

I could hear the trees whispering in the wind and the boards of the house creaking and settling. In the yard, a child’s swing moved back and forth as the wind caught it. It seemed that there was movement all around us as we spoke, as if our words had awoken something that had been asleep for a long time.

“Two other children disappeared three months later, black children both, one within a week of the other. Cold it was. Folks thought the first child, Dora Lee Parker, might have fallen through some ice while playing. She was the very devil for ice, that child. But all the rivers were searched, all the ponds dredged, and they didn’t find her. The police, they came and questioned me again, and for a while even some of my own neighbors looked at me kinda fu

“The third child didn’t come from Haven, he came from Otterville, about forty miles away. ‘Nother black child, little boy named”-he stopped and put the palm of his hand to his forehead, pressing lightly, his eyes closed tight-“Bobby Joiner,” he finished quietly, nodding slightly. “By then, people was getting scared and a deputation was sent to the sheriff and the mayor. People started keeping their children inside, specially after dark, and the police, they questioned every black man for miles around, and some white folks too, poor men they knew to be homosexuals, mostly.

“I think then there was a waiting period. Those people waited for the black folks to breathe easy again, to get careless, but they did not. It went on and on, for months, till early in nineteen seventy. Then the little Demeter girl disappeared and everything changed. The police, they questioned people for miles around, took statements, organized searches. But nobody saw a thing. It was like the little girl had disappeared into thin air.

“Things got bad then for black folks. The police figured there might be a co

“The boy was a sharp one. He remembered the make of the car, described the woman, even recalled some of the numbers on the license plate. But it wasn’t till the next day that someone else recalled the car and they went looking for Adelaide Modine.”

“The police?”

“No, not the police. A mob of men, some from Haven, others from Batesville, two or three from Yancey Mill. The sheriff, he was out of town when it happened and the FBI men had left. But Deputy Earl Lee Granger, as was, he was with them when they arrived at the Modine house, but she was gone. There was only the brother there and he shut himself in the basement, but they broke in.”

He was silent then and I heard him swallow in the gathering dark, and I knew that he had been with them. “He said he didn’t know where his sister was, didn’t know nothing about no dead children. So they hanged him from a beam in the roof and called it suicide. Got Doc Hyams to certify it, though that basement was fourteen feet from floor to ceiling and there was no way that boy could have gotten up there to hang hisself ’less he could climb walls. Folks after used to joke that the Modine boy wanted to hang his-self real bad to get up without help.”

“But you said the woman was alone when she tried to snatch the last child,” I said. “How did they know the Modine boy was involved?”

“They didn’t, at least they weren’t sure. But she needed someone to help her do what she did. A child is a hard thing to take sometimes. They struggle and kick and cry for help. That’s why she failed the last time, because she had nobody to help her. At least, that’s what they figured.”

“And you?”

The porch was quiet again. “I knew that boy and he wasn’t no killer. He was weak and…soft. He was a homo-sexual-he’d been caught with some boy back in his private school and they asked him to leave. My sister heard that when she was cleaning for white folks in the town. It was hushed up, though there were stories about him. I think maybe some people had suspected him for a while, just for that. When his sister tried to take the child, well, folks just decided he must have known. And he must have, I guess, or maybe suspected at least. I don’t know but…”