Page 62 of The Reformatory

Gloria forgot her half-eaten biscuit. Her hand tightened on her leather seat, fingers curling. She studied her side mirror as they passed the sheriff’s car. Leaving before dawn had seemed like a good idea until now. People disappeared in the dark.

Miz Lottie did not slow her driving or speed up. Gloria glanced at the speedometer, and she was driving at precisely twenty-five miles per hour, which Papa had called the Negro speed limit even though the sign on the road proclaimed it was thirty-five.

The clay road separated the deputy’s car from them by ten yards, fifteen yards, and the car still did not move. But when they reached the paved road that became Main Street, the car crawled from the bushes, bright headlights flicking on, lighting up the truck’s cab like morning.

Gloria jumped. But it’s not the red lights, she reminded herself between throbs from her heart. They only had to stop for the flashing red light.

“He stops us, you leave the talking to me, hear? Don’t you say a word.”

Gloria only nodded. She’d already forgotten the proper names to cite. “He doesn’t have the right to stop us. We haven’t done anything.”

“Hush that damn foolishness.”

Only their two vehicles rolled past the darkened storefronts on Main Street, where even the neon Coca-Cola sign at Meg’s Diner wasn’t yet lighted red. Mannequins were ghosts in the windows. The parking spaces were empty. Miz Lottie tested her speed, creeping higher to thirty miles per hour.

“Don’t speed up,” Gloria said.

“They stop you if they think you actin’ scared too. Just sit tight.”

Miz Lottie had borrowed all of Gloria’s courage. Papa had been pulled over time after time with Gloria under one pretense or another, and she could not remember being more afraid. She did not feel like the same person who had marched to Red McCormack’s yard. Trespassing, he’d called her visit. What if the sheriff was looking for her? Her head swiveled to peek back.

“What I just tell you?” Miz Lottie said, so Gloria stared ahead as their truck crawled past the darkened courthouse and the hanging tree.

At the end of Main Street, Miz Lottie drove to the empty farm road toward State Route 90. Still the deputy’s red lights did not come on. And the tailing headlights drew farther and farther behind until Gloria’s mirror showed the sheriff’s car turning around and heading back toward the sleeping town. Gloria stared a long time to make sure she wasn’t only wishing him away.

Gloria’s stomach seized, nudging her throat. “Pull over,” she said. “Quick.”

“Don’t you be sick in my truck.”

Miz Lottie lurched to a stop just in time for Gloria to retch into the crabgrass below.

When her tears from the strain of vomiting cleared, she saw how close they were to a deep ditch that might have tumbled them both to their deaths, hidden behind the thick grasses.

“You almost ran us in a ditch, Miz Lottie.”

“Good thing I’m driving, or you’d run us in for sure. Close that door. Let’s go.”

An eerie feeling of being alone in the world smothered Gloria again on the open road as the wind fanned her face, still hot although it was dark. Even the logging trucks and tractors were gone, and it made her feel small. And hopeless. What could the two of them do in Live Oak?

What if they never found John Dorsey? Or he couldn’t be bothered with a case that seemed so small? They might be heading toward another disappointment as big as Miss Channing or the social worker. Sometimes the worst thing happened—usually, in fact. Gloria couldn’t remember a single time the best outcome had won out.

Miz Lottie began singing loudly, probably to stay awake, Mahalia Jackson’s “Walk with Me,” which was always playing on the record player Uncle June had bought her for Christmas. She sang at a faster tempo than the recording, tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel, her voice throaty and mostly on key: “I need you, Jeeee-sus… walk with me…”

Gloria joined in, tentatively. Her voice was not as good as Miz Lottie’s—she’d inherited Mama’s singing voice, not Papa’s—but she raised her voice to sing loudly to try to banish the gloom in her thoughts, trying to believe that the same Jesus who had forsaken Mama might help them get Robbie back. She felt trapped into singing, almost, like begging instead of worship, but she sang until her throat hurt. Until daylight was glowing pink and yellow at the horizon. Gloria thought she recognized God in the birth of new light and longed to pray, but her relationship with prayer had not been steady. Maybe she could pray through her eyes, with the pink golden light of dawn waking the colors all around her.

“How do you still believe in God, Miz Lottie?” she said. “With all the bad things.”

“Don’t you?”

She tried to, she’d tried hard for Mama, but she also knew it was possible that the sun was just a burning rock and had nothing to do with God. “Sometimes I do,” she said. “But since Mama… sometimes I don’t. Seems like the McCormacks in this world get all of God’s love.”

“You think no McCormack ever got sick and died?” Miz Lottie didn’t wait for an answer. “Seems like, that’s what you said. Nothin’ ain’t never what it seems. This whole world is a lie—the bad things, the good things. Only God’s kingdom is the truth. And when I meet Jesus face-to-face, you can bet I’ll have some questions. But ’til then, I don’t know why some got so much and we got so little. Could be a test. But I feel God blessing me, Gloria.”

“But how do you know?”

“It ain’t my head that knows,” Miz Lottie said. “But my heart do.”

Gloria wished she could catch hold of Miz Lottie’s unbroken faith and wrap it around herself like Joseph’s blanket. Sleepiness stole over her, although she jolted awake to bumps and turns.