He takes a sip of his wine, then looks away from me for a moment. “Well,” he says finally, “I didn’t want you to build here and maybe I was grasping at straws, but I wasn’t lying exactly.” He looks at me. “When we were kids, we all thought this area was haunted. All the kudzu. And the woods … You could hear the strangest noises coming from those woods, and—”
“You still can,” I say.
“Look, honey.” He sets down his glass and leans forward, elbows resting on his knees. “I didn’t want to get into this, so I guess I was beating around the bush in the letter. I’d hoped you and Jackson had some other option and if you were weighing one against the other, maybe I could sway both of you by writing to him. When he decided he wasn’t afraid of the Hockleys’ house and he wasn’t afraid of ghosts, I just let it go and said no more. But there used to be an area back there—” He nods toward the rear of the house. Toward the woods. “—a circular area where there weren’t any trees, and—”
“It’s still there,” I say.
“It is? After all this time?”
“Well, I think so. I mean, there’s like … a clearing. And it’s roughly circular. Nothing much growing in it. It’s kind of weird.” I remember feeling a chill in that circle. I feel another now.
Daddy sits back, clearly a bit stunned that the circle is still there. “Well,” he says finally, “the Klan would meet there.”
“The KKK met in my backyard?”
He nods. “A very long time ago, yes. There was a dirt road back then … Hockley Street itself was a dirt road … but this was more of a skinny, muddy trail, just wide enough for a single vehicle to get down. And it led all the way from the end of Hockley Street through where this house is now and back to that clearing. And it became—”
“When was this? I mean, like, what years?”
“When I was a young man. The sixties. The Klan was active then because of all the civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, et cetera. The Klan would have big rallies in much bigger venues than your little circle in the woods, but some of the local Klavern held secret meetings there. Here.” He points toward the rear of my house. “At the end of Hockley Street.”
“But Daddy,” I say, still perplexed as to why this would disturb him decades later. “That’s ancient history. Yes, it’s creepy. But someone could find fault with any place we chose to build. Don’t you think?”
He nods. “You’re right, of course. It’s just that I was … so aware of this. I mean, I knew some of those Klansmen.”
“You knew them? Like, as friends?”
“It wasn’t the way you think of the Klan today. Back then, a lot of otherwise upstanding people in town belonged. I guess I felt like, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t want that sort of history in the backyard where my kids were going to play.”
“Well, that’s—” I hunt for a word. “—unsavory, I guess,” I say. “But it’s not like they lynched anybody back there, right?”
He doesn’t answer as quickly as I would have liked. “Right,” he says finally.
“They didn’t, did they?” I ask, thinking of those eerie animal screams I’d hear at night.
“No honey,” he says. “No one was lynched in your backyard.”
“If that’s what you were worried about, why didn’t you just tell us?” I ask. “Let us decide if it bothered us enough that we didn’t want to build here?”
He looks at the ceiling. “In retrospect, that’s what I should have done,” he says.
“That wouldn’t have stopped us.” Actually, I think it might have, but it’s too late now. “But on another note, Daddy, here’s my bigger question.” I kick off my sandals and tuck my legs under me on the sectional. “I practiced yoga with Ellie Hockley today and I learned that you and she were once an item.”
His eyes widen. “She told you that?” he asks.
“Not directly. Her friend came over. Brenda. She told me.”
“Brenda was there?” he asks. “That surprises me. She and Ellie had some sort of falling-out decades ago, after her husband died.”
“Garner,” I say. “Brenda said you were good friends with him and he died in a fall. Sort of like Jackson.”
He lets out his breath as though he’d been holding it in. Sets his wineglass on the side table. “Garner. Yeah,” he says. “We were good friends back then. It was awful. Brenda lost her baby. I tried to comfort her after it happened, but she withdrew from everyone. I almost never see her around town; she became sort of reclusive, I guess.”