Missing Isaac Read online

  © 2018 by Valerie Fraser Luesse

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-1261-7

  Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  “Valerie Luesse has an ear for dialogue, an eye for detail, and most of all, a profound gift for storytelling. She breathes life into these colorful Southern characters and this quirky Alabama town from the first page, and then she has you. As the senior travel editor at Southern Living, Valerie knows how to take readers on a journey, and with Missing Isaac she has taken that skill to a whole new level.”

  —Sid Evans, editor in chief of Southern Living

  “Welcome debut novelist Valerie Fraser Luesse to the legions of gifted Southern writers before her. Missing Isaac is the first of what we hope will be many more tales from this talented writer.”

  —Nancy Dorman-Hickson, coauthor of Diplomacy and Diamonds and a former editor for Progressive Farmer and Southern Living magazines

  “Looking both acutely and compassionately past the upheavals that defined the South in the troubled 1960s, Valerie Fraser Luesse’s beautiful story of a white boy’s quest for a missing black field hand reveals the human heart that always beat beneath the headlines. In the process, she movingly illuminates not only the spirit of a special region but the soul of every human being who ever dared to care. Missing Isaac will break—and then heal—your heart.”

  —J. I. Baker, journalist and author of The Empty Glass

  For Dave and my parents

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Endorsements

  Dedication

  Part I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Part II

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  Part 1

  One

  OCTOBER 10, 1962

  A sleepy purple twilight wrapped around the farmhouse, its tall windows glowing with warmth from somewhere inside. It was suppertime, and the cool October air smelled of cotton lint and field dust. Inside was an eleven-year-old boy playing checkers with his grandfather. As was his custom lately, he wore a flannel shirt many sizes too big for him.

  “Pete, honey, you’ve got a closetful of clothes—why do you insist on wearing that old hand-me-down of your daddy’s?” his mother asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “’Cause he gave it to me, I guess.”

  There was more to it than that, of course. The truth was that Pete’s father was both his hero and his best friend. There was no one he admired more than Jack McLean, no one he so longed to emulate. Not only that, but he thoroughly enjoyed his father’s company—and Pete could tell the feeling was mutual.

  So there he sat at his mother’s kitchen table, wearing his daddy’s shirt and holding a tentative finger on one of two red checkers still remaining on the board. “Okay, Daddy Ballard,” he said to his grandfather as he lifted his finger and leaned back in his chair. “Your move.” Their checkers game had become a weeknight ritual.

  “You sure, son?” his grandfather said with a grin.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Pete’s mother peeled a colander of potatoes at the sink as a radio played in the windowsill.

  Mrs. Kennedy attended a charity luncheon in Washington this afternoon. The First Lady wore an autumnal suit of red wool crepe . . .

  Daddy Ballard made the only remaining move left to him. Pete’s face lit up when he saw his opportunity—the long-awaited winning jump.

  “I won! I finally won!” he cried as his grandfather laughed. “Wanna play again?”

  His mother shook her head. “Now, Pete, you know your daddy’ll be home before too much long—”

  She was interrupted by the blaring of a truck horn. It blew and blew all the way from the county blacktop, and you could hear the tires slinging gravel as they sped up the driveway and into the backyard. Pete looked at his mother, whose face had frozen in fear and dread.

  All three of them had heard it—the split-second transformation of ordinary sounds into a cry of alarm. Truck horns, tires churning gravel, men yelling to be heard over machinery—these were everyday background noises on the farm. But when something went wrong, when someone got hurt, those very same sounds took on an urgent tenor. You could hear it. You could feel it in your bones.

  “Y’all in there? Come quick!” It was Isaac, one of Daddy Ballard’s field hands, who helped Pete’s father work the cotton.

  The adults bolted for Isaac’s truck, with Pete leaping over the tailgate and crouching in back before they had time to tell him not to. Cold wind blasted his face as they raced down the narrow strip of pavement to a dirt road that divided two sprawling cotton fields. He had to hold on tight as Isaac drove straight through the cotton, bouncing over furrows and tearing through tall, brittle stalks to get to a giant ball of light glowing in the distance.

  So many trucks were beaming headlights onto the accident that it looked like a football stadium on Friday night. Chains rattled and clouds of red dust swirled everywhere as the field hands and Pete’s uncles—summoned from their own family farm—made a frantic attempt at a rescue.

  “Shut that engine off!”

  “Get the slack out! I said get the slack out!”

  “Back up, back up, back up!”

  “Can you see him? I said can you see him!”

  Daddy Ballard held Pete’s mother back.

  “Jack!” She screamed his name over and over and over.

  At the center of it all was a massive red machine, his father’s cotton picker, turned upside down in a sinkhole like a cork in a bottle. One of its back wheels was still spinning against the night sky, like it was trying to run over the moon. Pete could hear—or maybe he just imagined—clods of red clay splashing into the watery sinkhole far below the snowy clouds of cotton. And he knew, without anybody telling him, that his father was lost.

  Spotting him standing beside the truck, wide-eye
d and horrified, Isaac came to pick him up. But with nowhere to take him, Isaac just walked around and around the truck, Pete’s legs dangling like a rag doll.

  “You gonna be alright. You gonna be alright. We gonna make it alright.” Isaac was shaking.

  Pete heard a loud, booming crash as the trucks pulled the picker over onto its side to clear the hole.

  “There he is! Lower me down! Hurry!” That was Uncle Danny, his father’s oldest brother. Isaac had stopped in a spot that kept Pete’s back to the accident. “Pull! Ever’body pull harder!”

  There was a momentary silence before Pete heard the sound of water dripping off of something heavy. It reminded him of the sound his father’s Sunday shirts made when his mother hand-washed them, plunging the saturated cloth up and down in the sink.

  Soon the field hands began to moan. “Sweet Jesus. Mister Jack . . .”

  Only then did Pete realize it—Isaac was soaking wet.

  Two

  OCTOBER 12, 1962

  Pete stood next to his mother at the head of a long line of family just outside the First Baptist Church of Glory, with Daddy Ballard and Aunt Geneva, his mother’s only sister, behind them. It felt oddly like Vacation Bible School, when the kids all lined up to march in and pledge their allegiance “to the Bible, God’s Holy Word,” before adjourning to their classrooms to memorize the names of the disciples and decorate bars of soap to give their mothers on commencement night.

  Pete had tried hard to get all of his crying done last night—privately, in his room, sobbing into a pillow so his mother wouldn’t hear. He couldn’t bear the thought of making this day any harder for her than it already was. Grown men in the line were sniffling and dabbing at their eyes, but Pete remained stoic. Except for the sweat. He could feel it soaking the dress shirt underneath his suit coat. And because he had forgotten all about the white handkerchief in his pocket, he wiped his damp brow with the sleeve of his coat. How could it be this hot in October? That didn’t make any sense. And why wasn’t everybody talking about it? Grown people usually went on and on about the slightest hiccup in the weather.

  First Baptist was a pretty little church—red brick with double white doors, arched windows, and a big iron bell hanging beneath the steeple. Just last Wednesday, the church held a business meeting and voted to modernize by starting a central air fund, but for now the windows were slightly open to circulate the autumn air, and Pete could hear Miss Beulah Pryor finishing up “Heaven Will Surely Be Worth It All” on the organ. Soon she would play “Precious Memories,” which was what she always played when families marched in to bury their dead.

  As she began the opening strains, the undertaker opened the church door with one hand and summoned the family with the other. The sun shone so brightly in Pete’s eyes that the man’s face was just a featureless shadow. All he could see clearly was that spooky beckoning arm. His legs felt like they were turning to sand, and he didn’t think he could move, but somehow he managed, one foot ahead of the other, up the steps and down the aisle.

  Pete could feel the old wooden floor give a little with the weight of his family marching in, but he knew it would hold, as it had for so many other families before. He took his seat on the front pew between his mother and Daddy Ballard. Ordinarily Aunt Geneva would be playing the piano for the service. But not today. She and her family sat right behind them.

  His mother kept still, her eyes fixed on the white dove that hung on the back wall of the baptistery. Hers was not a calm stillness but a constrained one, as if the slightest move might send her flying all to pieces. Miss Beulah’s sister began to sing.

  Precious mem’ries, how they linger.

  How they ever flood my soul.

  Pete ran his fingers through his sandy-brown hair, thick and wavy like his father’s. His mother had tried for the longest time to subdue it with Brylcreem. But then out of the blue one Sunday morning, she pitched the Brylcreem in the trash, shrugged, and said, “Well, I guess the Lord blessed you and your daddy with untamable hair. Who am I to question it?”

  Pete couldn’t remember which had brought him more pleasure—emancipation from hair potion or the comparison to his father.

  The family had congregated at his parents’ rambling white farmhouse that morning so they could travel to the church together. All morning long, Pete had marveled at the adults’ ability to talk about anything and everything except the terrible thing that had brought them together.

  “Has everybody got coffee that wants some?”

  “It’s so good to see y’all. ’Course, we wish it was under happier circumstances . . .”

  The aunts especially liked to talk about those “happier circumstances.” With the exception of “some things we just can’t understand,” it was their very favorite thing to say.

  A few minutes before eleven, Uncle Danny had called the family together in the living room. “Let’s have a word of prayer before we go. And on the way to the church, y’all remember to burn your brights.”

  The whole family traveled in one long caravan with their headlights on high beam. All along the three-mile drive, every car and truck that they met pulled over to the side of the road in a silent show of respect. Ever since he was a little boy, Pete had known that burning headlights in a procession meant, “We’re burying somebody we love,” and the cars idling on the shoulder were answering, “We’re just as sorry as we can be.” Nobody had to say a word. They didn’t even have to know each other. Their vehicles did the talking.

  The preacher’s voice brought Pete back to the church and the unthinkable thing that was happening.

  “To everything there is a season. A time to live and a time to die. A time to plant and a time—like right now, as all you farmers know—to pluck up that which was planted. There is a time to mourn and a time to dance. Folks, don’t nobody in this church feel like dancing today. Because for reasons we can’t understand, it was Brother Jack’s time to die—just as he was plucking up that which he had planted.”

  There was a logical reason for sinkholes. Daddy Ballard had once explained it. Some parts of Alabama have layers of limestone beneath the soil, and there are places where water flows beneath the rock. The water can wear away such a big section of limestone that the cotton field is like a rug covering up a hole in the floor. Anything heavy that runs over it will fall straight through. Pete’s father had fallen through a rug of red clay and landed in a deep, dark hole. He had gone to the field that morning just as he had done his whole life. But this time, his field devoured him.

  Pete rejoined the sermon just as the congregation stood for the closing prayer. He had no idea what the preacher had said. All he knew was that the pallbearers were about to carry his father away. Forever.

  “Almighty God, we humbly come before you seeking that peace that passeth all understanding . . .”

  After the funeral, the entire community descended on Pete’s house, but the crowd was a blur to him, like a swarm of gnats swirling around the only person he really wanted to talk to right now, his mother. She had taken his father’s worn leather recliner as her post and wouldn’t leave it. She must’ve sat there for hours. As neighbors and church members filed in, they would lean down to hug her or reach out to squeeze her hand. Somehow she would smile and thank them “so much for everything.” But Pete could see that she wasn’t really there. His mother had hidden herself away somewhere deep down in that shell of politeness. He couldn’t reach her. Nobody could. But he knew that wherever she was, she was still screaming his father’s name.

  He wandered into the dining room, where his Aunt Virgie was rearranging the already crowded buffet to make room for still more food just delivered by the Methodist ladies, who didn’t see him at first. In hushed voices, they discussed his father’s accident.

  “Can you believe it? Before the family could get there, that colored boy found him an opening and jumped in that sinkhole tryin’ to save Jack. They say he didn’t have nothin’ but a flimsy hay rope tied around him. It’s a
thousand wonders they’re not layin’ him in the ground at Morning Star Baptist this very minute.”

  Before Pete could hear any more, Aunt Virgie glanced up from the pound cake she was slicing and saw him standing there. She was actually his great-aunt, Daddy Ballard’s sister. She was at least six feet tall and stout as a field hand.

  “Pete, honey,” she said, “c’mere and let your Aunt Virgie fix you a plate.”

  The Methodist ladies scattered.

  “I’m not hungry,” Pete said, “but thank you.” The truth was that he didn’t think he could swallow anything without throwing up.

  “Well, you just let Aunt Virgie know if you change your mind, punkin’.”

  He knew she meant well, but she was talking to him like he was four, and that made him want to kick her in the shins, which was a mean and spiteful way to feel. “Don’t be like that,” his mother would say.

  If food like this had appeared on a normal day, he wouldn’t be able to fill his plate fast enough. The table, buffet, and kitchen counters were covered with platters of fried chicken, casseroles, and heaping bowls of potato salad, along with black-eyed peas, butter beans, creamed corn, green beans, candied sweet potatoes, and mountains of dinner rolls. Pete counted five plates of deviled eggs, three chocolate layer cakes, a red velvet cake, four pecan pies, a ham from Aunt Virgie’s smokehouse, a big Mason jar of her homemade mustard, and a disturbing number of congealed salads made from Jell-O. Why couldn’t people just bring Jell-O instead of mixing it with heaven knows what and covering it with marshmallows and nuts? Miss Beulah was forever bringing that awful lime-green one that Pete hated most of all.

  In desperate need of escape, he slipped upstairs. There, in the blessed quiet of his room, he spotted something small, about the size of a pocketknife, on his bed. He smiled, even on this awful day, because he immediately recognized it—the rabbit’s foot Isaac had often let him see but never let him touch.

  “You let somebody touch your rabbit’s foot,” Isaac had told him, “and you got to give it to him. Otherwise, it’s gonna bring you bad luck, the kinda bad luck usually ’sociated with a black cat crossin’ your path. And that there’s some serious bad luck.”