The Tree of Forgetfulness by Pam Durban Page B

Graniteville along the hard clay back roads. The two men in the front and the girl in the back, a tired-looking girl with wary eyes, a dark shingle of hair, a necklace of puckered gold berries on a dirty string around her neck. “Chainy-berries,” she called them when he asked, then looked at him as though she’d never seen anything like him before.
    â€œYou being a stranger and all, there’s a few things about old Moseley that you need to put in your hopper,” the sheriff said. “I don’t know what he’s got against me, but he’s always had imaginings. He told me once he thinks he’s the reincarnation of some general from three thousand years ago. Him and that Charlie George down at the Graniteville train station, they both have it in for me.”
    â€œHe said the same about you,” Barrett said. “That you have it in for him, I mean. Some Klan business from way back when?” Moseley protected himself from his imaginings with loaded guns. A shotgun leaned against a doorjamb, a pistol on a table. Moseley himself wore a .45 in a holster, and his three sons each carried a revolver. He’d watched them through the window of Moseley’s stuffy office, patrolling the yard while his wife served them iced tea from a pitcher on a tray.
    â€œAh, hell,” he said. “Like I said, he’s always had imaginings.”
    â€œThe Rainey girl said you gave her a pair of shoes when you let her out of jail,” Barrett said.
    â€œThe poor sorry thing didn’t have any,” he said. “All’s I’m saying is that there’s things you should know about that little old girl that it’s not Christian of me to divulge, and I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t my duty and you a stranger here and unfamiliar with a lot of things.” He was a deacon in the Baptist church down in Graniteville. A God-fearing, Bible-reading man, his pastor said.
    â€œShoot,” Barrett said, and for a second the sheriff’s face lit up the way a match flares in a dark room. Don’t I wish?
    â€œYou ask any law-abiding citizen in this county about that bunch, you’ll get you an earful. To start with, her family’s all bootleggers,” he said. He’d known her people out in the Ellenton section for longer thanhe cared to remember, and the whole time he’d been sheriff, he’d been slapping them in jail for one thing or another, liquor mostly, which they all made and sold and drank. Ella was in jail in the first place because she’d tried to run away from a car full of gallon jugs of whiskey and beer that he’d stopped one night on the Aiken-Augusta highway.
    Now Barrett opened his notebook, thumbed back through a few pages. “She said her father was a constable in Ellenton,” he said.
    The sheriff laughed, braced his hands on his knees, and went on laughing. “Did she say that? I guess the old loony spent so many days in the custody of lawmen, he started to believe he was one.” That was how it went, the sheriff said, until one day, lo and behold, the old man turned up with a bullet through his head out in the piney woods behind the family shack where his daughter always went to whelp her young.
    Barrett flipped through more pages in his notebook. “Just give me a minute,” he said. “She said she heard your voice at the jail that night. Said you came up the stairs—here it is—‘talking and laughing.’ ”
    Everything in the sheriff’s face stopped working at once, as though a gear had jammed in some good-humored machine. “Now look here,” he said. “I don’t know why she’s telling dirty lies about me, but now that she is, I’m going to have to go look into it.” He stood up from the table and crossed the room like someone excused from the witness stand, snatched his hat off a nail driven into the wall beside the door. “Why don’t you take your