LITMIR.BIZ

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it.”

      Pearlie always minimized the negative aspects of any situation. Part of what she was paid for, I suppose. I even used to hear her sing an old Johnny Mercer song to that effect while she worked: “You got to ac-cent-uate the positive, e-lim-i-nate the negative …”

      “Could be deer blood,” Pearlie suggests. “Or armadillo maybe. Dr. Kirkland shoots armadillos round here all the time. They always digging up the yard, nasty things.”

      “There are tests that will tell me whether the blood’s human. You know, it would take a lot of blood to make prints this well defined. There’s a boot print, and also the print of a child’s bare foot.”

      Pearlie stares down with mute skepticism.

      “Have there been any children around here since I left?” I’m an only child, and my aunt Ann, despite three marriages, has no children. “Has Natriece been around here much?”

      Pearlie shakes her head. “My kids live in Chicago and Los Angeles, you know that. And Natriece only been to this house two times before this. She never been out here that I know about.” She turns and glares at Natriece. “You ever been in this room before, child?”

      “No, ma’am.”

      “Answer me straight, now! I ain’t one of them soft teachers you got at school.”

      “I’m telling you true!”

      As Natriece pooches out her lower lip, I kneel and study the fading image of the bare foot. Pearlie’s right; it’s nearly vanished. “Natriece, will you take off your flip-flop and put your foot over here?”

      “In blood?”

      “Not in it. Just hold your foot above the rug.”

      The little girl slips off her yellow flip-flop and places a callused foot in my waiting hands. I hold it just above the dying glow of the footprint. It’s almost a perfect match.

      “How old are you, Natriece?”

      “Six. But I be big for my age.”

      “I think you’re right.” I had guessed her age as eight, so her foot is probably about the size of a normal eight-year-old’s.

      Pearlie is watching me with a worried look.

      “Where’s Mom, Pearlie?”

      “Where you think? Gone to Biloxi again.”

      “To see Aunt Ann?”

      “What else? That Ann draws trouble like my Sheba draws tomcats.”

      “What about Grandpapa?”

      “Dr. Kirkland gone off on another trip. He supposed to get back later today, though.”

      “Where has he been? The island?”

      “Lord, no. He ain’t been down there in a good while.”

      “Where, then?”

      Pearlie’s face closes. “I ain’t supposed to say.”

      “Not even to me?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “Pearlie …”

      The maid sighs and cocks her head at me. She and I have kept each other’s secrets for years. Pearlie kept quiet about my sneaking in and out of the house as a teenager, which she usually witnessed while smoking on her porch in the wee hours. I kept quiet about occasional male guests staying over at Pearlie’s house. Pearlie was never officially divorced, but she’s been alone since she was thirty, and as she often said, she might be old, but she wasn’t dead.

      “You won’t say I told?” she asks.

      “You know I won’t.”

      “Dr. Kirkland gone to Washington.”

      “Washington, Mississippi?” Washington is a small town about five miles east of Natchez, and at one time the territorial capital of Mississippi.

      Pearlie snorts. “Dr. Kirkland wouldn’t waste five minutes out there, unless there was timber to buy out that way.”

      “Then where?”

      “Washington, D.C., girl. He go up there all the time now. I think he must know the president or something.”

      “He does know the president. But that can’t be who he’s seeing. Who is it?”

      “I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.”

      “Not Mom?”

      “She act like she don’t. You know your grandfather.”

      I want to ask more questions, but Natriece doesn’t need to hear them. I cut my eyes toward the child, who is trying to reach one of the silk dragonflies hanging in the corner of the room. Pearlie gets the message.

      “Run outside and play for a few minutes, Treecy.”

      Natriece pooches out her lip again. “You told me I could have a sno-cone if I was good.”

      I laugh despite my sense of urgency. “She promised me the same thing lots of times.”

      “Did you get it?” Natriece asks with severity.

      “If I was good, I did.”

      “Which wasn’t too often,” Pearlie snaps, taking a step toward Natriece. “If you don’t go play right this minute, you ain’t getting no kind of cone. You’ll be eating brussels sprouts for supper.”

      Natriece makes a face, then darts past Pearlie, just out of reach of the old woman’s spanking hand. I close the door. Pearlie is again studying the carpet where the bloodstains are hidden.

      “How is Natriece related to you? Granddaughter?”

      Pearlie laughs, a deep, rattling sound. “Great-granddaughter.”

      I should have guessed.

      “That’s what’s wrong with black peoples round here nowadays,” she says. “These little girls getting theirselves pregnant at twelve years old.”

      I can’t believe my ears. “They don’t do that alone, do they? What about the men who get them pregnant?”

      She waves her hand dismissively. “Oh, mens gonna be mens no matter how many shows Oprah runs about child mamas. It’s up to us old ones to teach these girls how to act. But they all too far from the church now, these young people. Mm-mm.”

      The last two syllables carry such finality that I know it’s fruitless to argue. “Pearlie, I want to talk to you about the night Daddy died.”

      She doesn’t turn away, but neither does she say anything. She doesn’t respond in any overt way, though I detect a deepening in her dark eyes. There are different levels of awareness in Pearlie’s eyes, the way there are in the eyes of most black people of her generation. In Natchez prior to 1965, a black person could witness a fatal shooting between two white people and see nothing at all. Such an event was “white folks’ business,” and that was that. I hate to think what sins lie concealed beneath that outdated rubric. Instead of prodding her further, I wait in silence.

      “You done asked me about that a thousand times, baby,” she says, closing her eyes against my scrutiny.

      “And you’ve put me off a thousand times.”

      “I told you what I saw that night.”

      “When I was a child. But I’m asking you again. I’m thirty-one years old, for God’s sake. Tell me about that night, Pearlie. Tell me everything you saw.”

      At last the eyelids open, revealing dark brown irises that have probably seen more of life than I ever will. “All right,” she says wearily. “Maybe it’ll finally settle you down.”

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