Chapter Twenty-One
By this time it was two o’clock and the heat was getting bad. I didn’t pass my favorite bank thermometer sign, but it was surely over a hundred, dry and still. It was so hot that even the crickets had grown quiet. I drove across town toward my grandmother’s apartment, but I didn’t get far, because as I was sitting at a red light it occurred to me that visiting Millie Macaboo unannounced might not be such a bad idea. Aunt Millie and I had always gotten along well, and I had no reason to think she was involved in anything improper. Yet she was the matriarch of the Macaboo family, and her late husband Lester had founded their fortune. I wondered if she knew anything that might help me unravel the mystery of the deaths of Lulabelle Mackenzie and Peter Crane.
I drove over to her house and parked on the street alongside it. Though Lester Jr.’s house was across the street, I didn’t see anyone out over there in the afternoon sun. I walked up the path to the back door of Aunt Millie’s, as I had always done. Looking back, I don’t think I ever went in or out the ornate front door of her house in my life. I rang the bell and Bessie Lee answered. She was glad to see me again and welcomed me into the kitchen. “What you doin’ out in this heat, Mr. Carey?” she asked me. Her white maid’s uniform was stretched over her ample hips, but she didn’t look uncomfortable in the cool, air-conditioned house. “Sit down and let me look at you,” she told me, and I obliged.
“I just thought I’d come for a visit,” I told her, and this was partially true. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to Aunt Millie alone in a long time.”
“Well, she’ll be glad to hear that, yes she will,” Bessie Lee answered. “Let me go get her. You found a good time to come, too,” she said, glancing at the small electric clock that hung next to a window. “Her stories are just over.” It was ten after two.
Bessie Lee went out of the kitchen and came back a few minutes later. “She’ll be right in,” she told me. “She just likes to freshen up a bit for you young men, you know.” I laughed, and she smiled a knowing smile at me. About five minutes later, Millie Macaboo entered the kitchen, walking hesitantly, holding her left arm out to her side and feeling along the wall. She knew her house very well but she was so blind that she needed help, refuse it as she might.
“Carey?” she said in her high-pitched but still strong voice. “There you are! What a surprise! I’m so glad you stopped by. Come in the parlor and sit down with me.”
I stood up and offered her my elbow, holding it out close to her in such a way that she knew what I was doing and could pretend to see me without being embarrassed. She took my arm and we strolled, slowly, into the parlor, where I led her over to a flower-print sofa and gently helped her sit.
“Why don’t you sit on your old favorite chair over there, honey?” she told me, motioning with her head toward a large leather recliner. I went over to it and sat down.
I remembered the chair from the summers of my youth. It had been quite impressive to me once, and it was probably the first and fanciest recliner I’d ever seen. With the push of a button, heat would pulsate through the back of it, and other buttons controlled a vibrating massage and a rolling-pin mechanism that would roll up and down your back as you sat.
“The old roller’s broken, I’m sorry to say, but I reckon the heat still works. I don’t use it myself,” Aunt Millie told me.
“That’s okay,” I replied. “I’m not looking for heat so much today--there’s plenty outside.” She smiled.
“How’s Mary?” she asked me, and I told her. “Always been as strong as a horse,” she said. “I think she passed it on to you, from the looks of things.”
Now it was my turn to smile. I shook my head sheepishly, though I doubt she saw. With Aunt Millie, you had to do everything verbally because you were never sure if she could see what you were doing out of the little pinpoint of vision that still remained in the corner of her eye.
“How are things at the bakery?” I asked her, trying to find a way to work the conversation around to where I wanted it to be.
“Oh my, I don’t get down there as much as I used to,” she told me. “I just go by once in a while with Bessie Lee to pick up some little things or to say hello to some of the old-timers there. You know, most everyone I knew there is gone. It’s almost all strangers now, even upstairs in the office.”
“But they all still know you,” I told her.
“Oh, they seem to,” she said, “but I’m not so sure they all do. Still, everyone is always polite. Lester sees to that.”
We sat there quietly for a few moments as I tried to think of something else to say. “I was over to the bakery on Wednesday,” I told her. “I saw Lester III. He gave me the grand tour.”
“Oh, how nice,” she replied. “He’s really doing very well there,” she added.
“I’ll bet it’s changed a lot over the years,” I prompted.
“It surely has. Why, I hardly recognize it. I remember when they built the new building as if it were yesterday,” she said.
New building? I’d never heard of that. “When was that?” I asked.
“It must have been twenty years now, I suppose,” she told me. “My boy got going so well that they just outgrew the old building and put up this new one. You should have seen it when it was new. There wasn’t a prettier building in town,” she smiled. “My Lester had been dead just a few years and it made me proud to see that the business was in such good hands.”
“I don’t think I ever saw the old building,” I told her.
“Oh no, you wouldn’t have. It must have been shut down when you were just a baby, if it wasn’t before you
were born. I can’t recall exactly when the new one went up. Must have been twenty years ago,” she said. She had a tendency to repeat herself in conversations.
“Where was the original building?” I asked her.
“It was on the other side of downtown, over on Fourteenth Street,” she said. “They tore the building down years and years ago. There’s a warehouse there now, but that part of town isn’t what it used to be.” By that, I assumed she meant it was either getting run down or blacks were moving in, or both.
“Did they just up and move one day?” I asked her.
“No,” she replied,” “it took awhile to build the new bakery, and then they took their time moving the operations over. There were people in the old building going through things for months after the new one opened up, as I recall.”
“Going through things?”
“Yes, like old files and papers and such. My Lester kept everything, it seemed. He liked to keep anything he could just in case it might come in handy for him down the road some day. They went through boxes and boxes and file cabinets, too, when they moved the building. My son is more of a modern businessman than his daddy was, and I don’t think he saw the need to keep all those old papers and such.”
“Did they save anything?”
“Oh, I’m sure they did. You’d have to ask Lester Jr. about that. That was his project to oversee. I wasn’t involved in those kind of details then or at any other time.”
“Were there any problems with the change to the new building?” I asked.
“No, not really. Not like before,” she said.
“Were there problems before?”
“I recall something a long time ago that made my Lester very mad, but I can’t put my finger on just what it was. He was a good Baptist, bless his soul, but you know he always loved his horses and that kind of a man isn’t easily tamed.” She chuckled at the memory of her husband, the good Baptist.
“When was that?”
“Oh my, that’s going back before the war. As I recall, it had something to do with the colored folks at the bakery and there were some changes made and there was a big stir for a little while but it settled down and things were fine afterwards. I don’t recall anymore about it. My memory’s not quite what it used to be, young girl that I am.”
It was my turn to chuckle. “You must be tired, Aunt Millie,” I said.
“Well, I haven’t had my afternoon nap yet. I was just about to take it when you came,” she told me. I stood up and went over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She held on to my arm and got up from the sofa to walk me to the kitchen.
Bessie Lee was sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the radio turned down very low. “You all done, Mister Carey?” she said, standing up and turning off the radio.
“I think so,” I said, “though I hope I can come back again soon.”
“Oh, you be sure to do that,” Aunt Millie told me. “You know I always love seeing my favorite cousin.” She squeezed my arm and Bessie Lee let me out the back door. She poked her head out to thank me for stopping by to visit the old woman, not knowing my real purpose. I smiled and told her it was my pleasure.
I got back in my car and headed for the Ransom Free Public Library.
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