He pastes on a benevolent smile and opens the door to a petite young woman.
“You must be Margaret Costello.”
Chapter Four
Melody doesn’t pass another car as she covers the last few miles of the mainland’s palmetto-lined backroad, dotted with fishing shacks and the occasional heap of rubble Hurricane Dora had left back in ’64.
Midway across the low, rickety bridge to Barrow, a pair of nearly identical young Negro boys look up from their fishing lines and gape. She isn’t imagining the scrutiny, but it’s not because they know her terrible secret. It’s not even because of Travis’s flashy sports car.
She’s white—buckruh, as the island’s Gullah population would say. She doesn’t belong out here.
The sun sets as she bumps along the island’s only thoroughfare. It’s unpaved and bisects dense maritime forest. Twice, she passes the unmarked turnoff and has to turn the car around, a painstaking maneuver in the dark on the narrow road. At last, she finds her way to a low antebellum cottage framed by live oaks dripping silvery Spanish moss. Beside the bright blue front door, upended blue bottles adorn a crepe myrtle’s branches.
The house is dark, and she hears barking inside.
“It’s okay, Otis, it’s only me,” she calls, and the dog grows frenzied at the sound of her voice.
No one answers her knock. She tries the door. It’s unlocked. “Hello? Anyone—”
Oof. The pup bursts through the door to joyfully paw and lick her.
“All right, boy, you need to go back inside.”
He sits looking at her, tail thumping the porch floor, expression stating that he’s not going without her. She won’t go in uninvited. So she settles into a creaky wooden rocking chair on the low porch with Otis contentedly at her feet, waiting for the man they both love.
A creamy moon sliver rides amid more stars than Melody ever sees at home a few miles down the coast, across the state line. Out here there’s no ambient light to dim them, just a smattering of sleeping households scattered in acres of marshland.
Listening for footsteps to crunch up the lane, she hears nothing but insects whirring in the dense undergrowth, and every so often a soft equine nickering.
Barrow Island is populated by more wild horses than people. The few families that live here go back at least a hundred years, their collective roots entangled like a mangrove. A good number work in the paper mill, or as domestic staff on the mainland. Some are tradespeople, some unemployed, some enlisted and fighting in Vietnam.
One man is none of those things.
He’s a poet, a writer, a reader, a historian, a free thinker, an activist, and for a fleeting time in that summer of love, he was everything—her everything.
Staring at a bare, unruly wisteria vine tangling up the porch post and crawling along the slatted blue ceiling, she thinks of the one her mother has spent years diligently pruning and training over an arbor, infuriated by its refusal to flower.
“The garden club president told me I’ve done everything right!” she’d told Melody last spring when the wisteria burst forth with sturdy green leaves and not a hint of delicate blossom.
“Maybe you should just give up on it, Mother.”
“Never!” snapped Honeybee Abernathy—born Hannah Beauregard, descended from the confederate general known as the Little Napoleon.
Otis lifts his head expectantly, ears twitching. Melody expects to hear a car, but he’s looking in the wrong direction. Moments later, there’s a thrash-splash in the gator-infested marsh beyond the trees. She shudders, and the dog rests his head on his paws once again.
A damp gust slinks through the live oaks, giving the gnarled moss a good shake. The February night is cool and breezy, scented by the sea and the occasional waft of noxious fumes from a mainland paper mill. She wishes she were wearing a warmer coat, a head scarf, gloves.
She remembers a sweltering late August afternoon back home when everything in the world was stifling and still, except the ocean and her own rage. She couldn’t bear to remain in the house where she’d just opened a drawer to look for something and found . . .
Something else. Something so terrible she was certain her eyes had deceived her. But it was real, and she’d fled.
She’d covered two miles from her house near the Intracoastal Amelia River across town to Main Beach, where the Atlantic Ocean lay sparkling blue. She’d left her shoes in the dunes beside a sea turtle’s nest and wandered out to the beach. The tide was going out. She walked south, ten miles all the way down to American Beach, established on Amelia’s south end as a “Negro Ocean Playground” three decades before the Civil Rights Act began allowing Black people on public beaches.
She walked without realizing where she was or that hours had passed, and the sunbathers, swimmers, and even the surfers had disappeared. A late afternoon storm exploded like a vengeful sea monster rising from the depths. She ran for cover toward the nearest building beyond the dunes, a small cottage painted bright blue.
“Come on, now,” a tall, shirtless Black man called in a rich baritone, holding the door open. Seeing the shaggy black Lab bounding around and yapping beside him, she’d thought he was talking to the dog—but no, he was waving Melody forward. “Come on inside, ma’am. Hurry! This is a nasty one!”
She ran right through that door and into the house. Just one sparsely furnished room, spotless and homey, but far from modern. In one corner, a wall-mounted sink, an icebox, and a battle-scarred stove on spindly legs.
It wasn’t his home, he said, closing the door after her, shutting out the wet wind. He was just staying at a traveling friend’s place for a few days, keeping an eye on things. There’d been some ugliness and vandalism in the area.
As he pulled on a chambray shirt, she noticed his lean muscles and that he was wearing a gold necklace. Not hippie beads or a peace sign pendant, yet unusual, she thought, for someone so clean-cut.
A violent gust extinguished the lightbulbs before she could get a closer look at the necklace. As he went around holding matches to candles, the dog wagged its tail at Melody and settled at her feet, nuzzling her hand.
“Now, Otis, you just let her be. Don’t go slobbering all over our guest.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. I like dogs. His name is Otis? After Otis Redding?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He looked pleased.
“His version of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ is one of my favorite songs. You must really like his music, too, if you named your dog after him.”
“He’s one of the finest men I’ve ever known.”
“You know him?”
“Not well, but I have kin up Macon way. They introduced me to Otis a time or two, before he hit the big time.”
Well, that had broken the ice. They’d talked about Otis Redding and Otis the pup.
“You have a dog?” he asked.
“No, but . . . No.”
Her sister had always longed for one, begged for one, but Honeybee didn’t want muddy paws traipsing through the house. Melody didn’t tell him that, though. About her mother, or Ellie. Not that first day.
They talked about music, and books. About Dr. King and the war and LBJ.
“Sounds like you don’t trust the president much.”