Megan Abbott - Mississippi Noir

“Were you born in Holly Springs?” Miss Mary asked.

I said yes.

“I told you I’m from New York. People think New York and they think the city. But it’s a huge state. I’m from the Hudson Valley. Everyone asks me if I have culture shock. I don’t think so. I like it here.”

“You got family back there?”

“My family’s gone.”

“My mom and dad are dead. I live with my grandma.”

“Sweetie, I’m sorry.”

“Your family dead?”

She paused and looked out at the fluttering hummingbirds. “My dad is. My mom’s just gone.”

“Is anyone else here today?” I asked.

“Three other people work here. Landry is the director. He’s at a conference in Jackson. Willa is the native plant specialist, but she took the day off for a horse thing in Memphis. And then there’s Jimmy, the groundskeeper-slash-maintenance guy. I think he’s got jury duty.” She stood up. “You bring lunch? I have a peanut butter and banana sandwich. We can split it.”

“Ma’am, that’s okay.”

“You must be hungry.” She disappeared into the kitchen and came back out with half a sandwich wrapped in a paper towel.

I unfolded the paper towel and looked at it. The crust on the bread was thick and the bread was flecked with seeds. The peanut butter was crunchy-looking. I was used to Great Value white bread and peanut butter, the same peanut butter Grandma Oliver put in the mousetraps. I took a bite.

Miss Mary started telling me other things about herself. She said she hadn’t traveled much, but she’d spent some time in Florida. She had a distant cousin in Fort Myers who owned a bar. She said she was reading the Game of Thrones books and she wanted to go to France and she drove to Oxford last week to get milk at Brown’s Dairy and had gotten interested in birds after college.

I didn’t really have a life to tell her about. I wanted to make things up but that seemed like the wrong thing to do. I told her I liked whatever for music. I told her I watched movies at the library and that I liked horror books, but I didn’t remember the names of the ones I’d read. I told her I went to Oxford once for a football game against LSU and I couldn’t ever forget the people with chandeliers up in their tailgate tents.

She laughed and said, “Let’s go out on the Gator.”

We drove out to the far parts of the property on the Gator, and Miss Mary showed me an old sharecropper house where vultures tucked themselves into the darkness behind the broken windows. Across from that, down a scrubby dirt trail, was a slave cemetery that was really just a small patch of markers and mounds. The markers were thin stone slabs without any writing. Brightness settled on the graves from gaps in the nearby stand of trees. “It always makes me sad to think of what they must’ve gone through,” Miss Mary said, patting me on the shoulder.

Next she took me to Sharecropper’s Pond, where a beaver was trying to build a dam with a tree he’d gnawed down. She said they had a motion-detection camera set up on the other side of the pond to catch the beaver and the cranes and whatever else in action. One of her favorite things was to watch the footage when she came to work in the morning. “I didn’t have anything like this in New York,” she said.

“I went fishing with Phael once,” I said.

“Who’s Phael?”

“He’s my friend. He’s afraid of eating poison by mistake.”

“Like getting poisoned?”

“Like eating something that no one knows is poisoned. We didn’t eat any of the fish we caught. We just left them with the hooks in their mouths on a picnic table.”

“That’s sad.”

“I didn’t hate those fish though. I liked them. I felt sorry about it.”

Miss Mary was wearing a droopy backpack and she took out a canteen of water and a pair of binoculars. She shared the water with me; she really didn’t mind my lips on the canteen. I liked having my mouth where her mouth had been. She showed me how to focus the binoculars and I looked up at the sky and the tops of trees. I saw some little birds she said were chimney swifts.

We sat down on the grass and passed the canteen back and forth.

When we were done, she screwed the cap back on and we took the Gator over to a blind where a telescope was set up. A boom box was chained to the wall and Miss Mary turned on the radio to a Memphis station.

I looked through the telescope and I saw everything close up through the glass. Birds and mud and flowers and bushes and dry things and the ground where the sun had baked it hard. I aimed the telescope at the sky and focused in on the brightness.

Probably about forty minutes passed, and I was still looking through the telescope. Miss Mary wasn’t getting sick of it. She wasn’t complaining. She was just sitting there, looking peaceful. Eventually I stepped away from the telescope and sat next to her. “I got lost looking,” I said.

“You don’t have to apologize,” she said. “I was just taking in the day. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I came from some bad things back in New York. I’m trying to be positive. I’ve been doing yoga. I’ve been trying not to let negative energy influence me.”

“I wish I had a telescope or a pair of binoculars,” I said. “I’d look at things all day.”

Miss Mary opened up her backpack and took out the pair of binoculars she’d used at the pond. “Here. Take these.”

“Ma’am, I couldn’t.”

“Take them. I got them cheap. I have another pair. Plus, we have about twenty pairs back at the visitor’s center for camp.”

I took the binoculars and hung them around my neck and then glassed the treeline beyond the trail we were near. “I see a bird with a red head,” I said.

“That’s a woodpecker.”

I examined the woodpecker closely, the way he kissed the bark. “Why do you like me?” I asked. “I mean, why do you like hanging out with me?”

Miss Mary didn’t look startled or anything. “I guess I see something in you. Something I recognize. Some loneliness. I think we’re kindred spirits. I believe in that kind of thing, I do. Like maybe you were my son in another life. Like maybe I sang you to sleep.”

The woodpecker flickered away and I let the binoculars fall around my neck. “I feel that way too, I think. Like you took care of me once and you’re taking care of me again.”

“See?” she said.

“Thank you for the binoculars,” I said.

We went back to the visitor’s center and Miss Mary made me a glass of iced tea with honey stirred into it and a piece of lemon wedged on the rim of the glass. It was the best iced tea I’d ever had, nothing like the mix Grandma Oliver made or the Arizonas I got at the Shell. We sat in the main room where there were taxidermied animals: a bear, a coyote, a fox, a squirrel, two hawks, a mallard, and an otter. Glass cases filled with skins and hides and bones lined the walls. Miss Mary said, “I hope you had a good time. Next time we’ll pick blackberries.”

“I did.”

“I have to be here until four. Just wait for me, if you don’t mind. I’ll give you a ride.”

“I don’t mind.”

Outside we heard tires crunching gravel in the parking lot.

“Looks like we have a visitor,” Miss Mary said. “You can help me show them around. Maybe you want to volunteer here eventually? I can train you.” She went over to the window and looked out.

I stood next to her. A van had parked behind her car, blocking it in. The van was red with gold stripes, and I could see the shape of a lady in the driver’s seat. She was smoking a cigarette, and I thought she must be pretty old because she carried herself with a sharpness. Miss Mary’s face had gone pale.

“Who is that?” I asked.