Finding Eliza Read online

***

  Following Thomas’ nap, the two men enjoyed the type of country meal that Avery remembered from his childhood. They stuffed themselves with fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and enough biscuits to last them until spring. After they finished, Avery cleared the dinner plates and silverware from the table. Thomas stretched and shuffled into the other room. Still drained after their earlier conversation at the diner, his movements were heavy and slow. Pouring his heart and sadness into his grandson had been a harder experience than he had expected. It had been years since he dragged up the details of that day. Hearing himself say the words caused him to relive the events. Thomas saw the pain in Eliza’s face as the men violated her. He heard the screams of Eldridge as he watched his love get beaten and broken. The demons awoke, and they weren’t letting the old man walk away without damage. His rest didn’t provide the respite that they had hoped it would.

  Standing at the kitchen sink rinsing dishes, Avery thought about his next move. He wasn’t used to thinking about people as threats, but that’s what Lizzie felt like. A panic welled up inside him and took over his body raising his blood pressure and heightening his anxiety. He couldn’t stop thinking of Lizzie Clydell and the pain that flashed in her eyes as she told him the story of her great aunt. She seemed so determined to locate the truth. As he thought of Lizzie’s words, his blood began to boil. The muscles in his neck and jaw tensed as he thought of the young woman who held his grandfather’s fate in her hands. He wasn’t sure if his anger would continue, and perhaps he didn’t care. His hands shook and caused the soapy china dish he held crashed to the ground.

  “Avery? You okay, son?” asked Thomas from the great room.

  “Sorry about the plate. I was just thinking, Gramps. I’ll clean it up.”

  The phone rang, breaking the heavy silence. Before Avery could pick up the heavy black receiver from its wall mount he heard his grandfather answer from the extension.

  “Well, hello there my dear. How are you this evening?” Thomas paused as the other unidentified party continued. “Aren’t you the sweetest? We’d be glad to come for dinner tomorrow. Avery will still be here. Can we bring anything? I can make some biscuits if you’d like.”

  Avery crept around the corner for a closer listen. He could hear the tone in his grandfather’s voice change, reflecting a little nervousness. Just as curiosity got hold of him, he heard his grandfather disconnect the call with a pleasantry.

  “So, which girlfriend invited you over?” Avery teased, hoping to lighten the mood.

  “That was Lizzie Clydell inviting us over for dinner tomorrow night. Avery, what will I do if she’s found out?” Thomas lowered his head into his hand and began to weep. “She’s so precious to me. Her grandmother is like family, and that little girl has filled a place in my heart that became so empty when your mama left town. What will I do if I lose her after she knows the truth? Your mama couldn’t face me when she found out about what my father did. What if it’s the same with Lizzie? What do I do now?”

  Avery walked over to his grandfather and joined him on the vintage settee. The old piece of furniture creaked as the two men sat side by side. Avery realized that after today their roles had become reversed. No longer was his grandfather patting the back of a scared boy assuring him that everything would be fine. It was Avery’s turn to give his grandfather words of comfort.

  “I’ll make sure it’s okay, Gramps. Just trust me. I won’t let anything happen.” Avery hoped that he wasn’t lying. “I’m sure she doesn’t know or she wouldn’t invite us. It will be fine. I promise.”

  As he walked into the kitchen to finish the after dinner chores, he noticed a photo on the wall. It was a wedding photo of new love. A young groom stood tall and thin in his best clothes wearing a look of accomplishment on his face. He was smiling, proud to be a new husband. His wife, delicate and small, stood next to him, her head barely reaching his shoulder. Her lips curled up toward her bright, wide eyes she held fixed on her husband. Her bridal headdress was made from a simple lace that was pinned in her hair and draped just behind her. Her hands lifted to her chest in order to hold her wedding flowers so the camera could capture the beautiful blooms. The groom gently held one of her hands to help support the weight of the bouquet while his other arm wrapped around her back. Their young faces seemed so full of hope and innocence.

  “Gramps, who’s this?” Avery was drawn into the image. He assumed it was his grandfather and grandmother as it took a position of prominence in the room. He was surprised that he had never noticed the heavy wooden frame with the thick beveled glass before. “Is this you and Granny?”

  “Believe it or not, that’s my father and mother on their wedding day.” Thomas looked up at his parents not with the face of an old man but the eyes of a child. “My father was innocent once. I’m not sure what happened to turn him into the monster that he would become later on. I love this photo because it makes me think that life could have been different if only he had kept that innocence. He had a heart that could love once. If only he had found the ability to give grace to others instead of sorrow.” His weak voice trailed off. “Don’t hate me, Avery. Don’t hate me for what my father did.”

  Avery stood with his grandfather and stared at the photo. He couldn’t believe that the face before him was that of Greer Abernathy, KKK member and the man that would ruin the lives of so many. “Lord be with me so I don’t become him,” he thought. From that moment on, Avery decided that appealing to Lizzie’s heart of forgiveness would be the only way to approach the situation.

  “We need to ask for grace, Gramps. That’s all we can do.”

  Avery knew then what he had to do. He needed to reach out to Lizzie and try to bring peace between their families before pain grew into hatred like it had all those generations before. He had to do it for himself as much as he did for Lizzie. Avery couldn’t allow the evil that lived in Greer to live in him, and grace was the only way to stop it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The sun glared into Lizzie’s eyes as she parked the truck in the gravel lot next to the cemetery. “I hope this isn’t too steep for you to get out, Gran,” she said fought against gravity to push the heavy metal door open.

  “You worry too much. I’m old but I’m not weak,” said Gertrude.

  Lizzie laughed as she stretched her back with her hands rested on her hips. She had been hesitant when her grandmother suggested they make a run to the cemetery before the barbecue, but the timing was perfect.

  “I guess if you have to spend a morning in the cemetery, it’s best to do it on a sunny one,” said Lizzie.

  “That’s how I know you haven’t been bitten by the bug yet.”

  “What do you mean?” Lizzie shaded her eyes with her hands as she looked toward her grandmother.

  “Once you’re hooked, it doesn’t matter if it’s sunny. You’ll hunt for your dead in a thunderstorm if you have to just to get the facts off the headstone.”

  The two women started walking up the path toward the cemetery. Lizzie offered her elbow as support but Gertrude refused. Bright sun showed through gaps in the trees where leaves were starting to fall. The fall was always her favorite time of year. This season had been particularly dry, so the leaves that dropped crunched under her feet. Bright golds, oranges, and reds mixed on the ground into a pile so colorful that it caught her attention.

  Lizzie found herself day dreaming about the many falls spent playing in the leaves with her father. He would rake the leaves just so he could watch his daughter jump into pile after pile as she laughed. She could still see her mother’s smiling face looking through the window from behind the curtains. Grace Hines thought she was catching a private moment between them, but both Elton and Lizzie knew she was watching. They let her have her secret, and they kept theirs.

  Snapping herself out of the past, Lizzie looked forward toward the hillside where the town’s dead had been laid to rest. As a general rule, she tried to avoid this place. It reminded her of the life sh
e had lost and put her into a bad mindset. The sadness started to creep into Lizzie’s chest. “Stay focused.” There was a time to mourn for her parents, and today wasn’t it.

  “Where are we headed, Gran?” she asked.

  “We need to go over there. That was the section he’d be in, not here with our kin.” Gertrude pointed a finger beyond the fence. Gertrude pulled out her map where she had marked a few potential locations for Eldridge’s grave and began walking toward the second section of burial plots.

  As they made their way through the larger section of the cemetery to the second gate, they wandered through row after row of headstones. The plots belonging to families with wealth were embellished with stones heavy in beautiful detail. Lizzie saw scrolls, crosses, and even unique stones carved to look like log stumps. Large spires and obelisks stood tall among smaller, more delicate slabs of stone. These contrasted with the stones of the older inhabitants which tilted and leaned as the ground around them settled. Despite their differences, each marker still bore witness to the life they represented.

  Lizzie and Gertrude crossed through the rickety gate that separated the old African American section from the original cemetery. The walking path wasn’t cleared of heavy rocks and vines as they had been from the ground in other sections of the cemetery.

  “The headstones look so different here,” said Lizzie. She noticed that the stones were rougher in design. Many included only initials and dates that looked as if someone chiseled them with common tools. Some were simply blank with no name to represent the life that was lost. They were a stark contrast to the others made by tradesmen who considered this type of work art. Row after row of headstones looked the same. Broken. Rough. Worn. The difference between the two sides of the fence was heartbreaking.

  “I just didn’t imagine it would look different,” said Lizzie. Like many of her generation, the idea that society separated and labeled individuals as better or less was foreign to her. The concept was one in her history book. It wasn’t supposed to be so accessible in her own town.

  “A lot of things were different. It just doesn’t seem real until you see it for yourself. Imagine being a grieving family and knowing that you had to be buried on this side of the fence just because of your skin color.” Gertrude stood looking across the cemetery. “This is why I need people to work with me on this cemetery, dear. They were treated so poorly in life. We have to protect them in death. If this cemetery is destroyed who will remember them?”

  Lizzie wound through the haphazard rows of graves with her grandmother. Finally, they found what they had come for: the headstone of Eldridge Reeves. It was a simple stone decorated with only a roughly carved cross followed by his name and date of death underneath. His grave sat between the graves of other families with no other Reeves names appearing near.

  “There’s no family near him.” Lizzie’s heart sank. “Why is he buried all alone?”

  “It could be that there weren’t any plots near his ancestors or perhaps this is where they had room at the time. He was likely the first to die in his family. His parents would most likely have been living. He was quite young, remember?” The headstone was overgrown from lack of care. Gertrude knelt down to clear the leaves and weeds from around the headstone. Lizzie bent to help her grandmother.

  “Did you ever find out what happened to his parents?” asked Lizzie.

  “His family left the county after his death. I can’t blame them. It wasn’t safe for them to stay. The memory had to be painful.” Gertrude wiped the dirt from her hands on a handkerchief that she had pulled from her back pocket. “I couldn’t begin to imagine the fear that they held, or the anger when they would walk through town not knowing. They would never know if they were coming face to face with his murderers on any given day. It was hard on my parents every day. It had to be the same for his family, only they had added danger. They couldn’t say anything or they could have been next. It was a dark time, Lizzie. A dark time indeed.”

  Lizzie wondered if they wrestled with looks of pity from their community as she did after her parents’ death. Now that it had been two decades, people had stopped identifying her as the child whose parents had died. How long would the town have identified them as the parents of a murdered son? It couldn’t have been easy to live in that shadow of cruelty, scandal, and loss.

  “I’ll take care of your grave, Eldridge. I’ll be your family now.” Lizzie knelt by the stone and said a prayer, determined to promise God that she would not let him be forgotten. “Don’t worry. I’ll always remember, as will my children after me.”

  Gertrude leaned near and rested her head on Lizzie’s shoulder. “That’s my girl.”

  The two walked through the cemetery gate and moved back into the section of the cemetery that held their ancestors. They crossed through the section that held the town’s founders and into the section that held the graves of Gertrude’s parents. They stopped in front of the joint headstone for Alston and Anne James. The wide marker spanned both graves and held their birth, marriage, and death dates.

  Gertrude walked up to the stone and placed her hand along the top edge. “If my daddy could only see us now,” she said, lifting her eyes to the heavens as her voice trailed off.

  To the left of Alston’s final resting place was the headstone of the young Eliza James. Several small statues of angels surrounded the base of the headstone, each with their head bent as if in mourning. Lizzie noticed the intricate design that adorned the corners of the stone. In the center was her inscription:

  Eliza Gertrude James

  1919-1934

  Daughter, Sister, Friend

  “Taken from us too soon”

  Lizzie stood still, looking at the headstone of her great-aunt, the mysterious Eliza. “I am so sorry this happened to you,” Lizzie whispered.

  “I think we would have liked her,” said Gertrude.

  Lizzie lifted her eyes to reply to her grandmother. Instead, she caught sight of the twisted and bare branches of a tree near the bank of the creek just beyond the final rows of headstones.

  “Unbelievable. Gran, look. That has to be it.”

  Lizzie ran over to the tree, jumping around rows of graves, and placed her hand on its trunk. She could almost feel the hatred that had burned scars into the bark. Titling her head toward the sky, she could see damage to the tree limbs, the gashes ripped out of the wood as if they were bleeding wounds from inside the tree itself. She was certain that a place couldn’t hold onto emotion, but this place seemed to exude it.

  “Why would they leave it standing?” she asked her grandmother, not expecting an answer.

  Lizzie started reliving the details she had read in Alston’s diary. Images flashed in her mind. She saw the creek bank where Eliza had been so roughly shoved into the water and the branch where Eldridge had finally lost his life. She turned toward her grandmother, her eyes begging for Gertrude to help her make sense of what she saw. Then she saw it. Just a few rows in front of them sat a weeping angel. Lizzie knew that there stood the place where her great-aunt’s heart broke. It was the angel that Alston had written about that night.

  Lizzie couldn’t focus. Her eyes became hazy and her ears grew quiet as the horrors of the location screamed out tears for Eliza. Her legs became weak as she struggled to process the events that took place where she stood almost a century before. Lizzie cried like the weeping angel who lay with her arms and head across the headstone where Alston found his sister. Within seconds, she was on her hands and knees begging God for understanding as Gertrude clutched her by the shoulders.

  She could hear Gertrude whispering in her ear. “Breathe, child. You’ve got to breathe.”

  Lizzie clung to the grass and earth looking for a place to release her anger. She needed a place to scream and something to rage against. Lizzie’s cries became louder turning into screams as they released into the air around her. She wept for innocence. She wept for the loss of life and love. Lizzie could no longer hold in the emotions that bubble
d up through the pages of the diary. She screamed for the anger and fear that entered her great-grandfather’s life that day. As the emotions took over, she realized she cried for something else. Lizzie also wept for her own loss.

  “Gran! I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” Ashamed, Lizzie dropped her eyes and whispered an apology.

  “Don’t think anything about it. You need to let it out. That’s what we were hoping for. You’ve got to finally let it all out.” Gertrude hugged her granddaughter close.

  Lizzie began to compose herself enough to stand. It wasn’t until she brushed the dry grass and crushed leaves from her clothing did she realize that she had collapsed onto the ground. Looking towards the sunset, she realized it was time to go home to Jack.

  “Look at the time. Mr. Thomas and Avery will be over to the house soon. I guess we better head back. I just want to make one more stop before we go.”

  The two walked hand in hand past the graves of Eliza, Alston, and Anne until they came to the graves of her parents, Elton and Grace Hines. Looking at the shared date of death, Lizzie began to cry soft tears despite the emotional exhaustion that she felt. Gertrude began cleaning the weeds and grass from around the base of the headstone as she had done with each stone they visited that day.

  “Your father never did like to keep his room tidy,” Gertrude whispered with a little giggle. She looked up at her granddaughter standing beside her and smiled. “They loved you dearly.”

  Lizzie smiled and knew that her grandmother was telling her the truth. She kissed her hand lightly and placed it on top of her mother’s name that was engraved into the marble headstone.

  “I’ll visit again soon. I just can’t stay today,” Lizzie whispered. “You may have been taken from me, but at least you weren’t taken from each other.”

  The two women walked in silence toward the parking lot while each wiped the tears from her eyes. When they reached the bottom of the hill, Lizzie turned toward the cemetery one last time. She stood in silent remembrance for a moment before opening the car door for her grandmother. They settled in for the short drive home, neither saying a word until they reached their destination.