The People Imagine a Vain Thing

A Short Story of Damnation in the American South

Abandoned Church in Rural Alabama, 2010, Photograph, Carol M. Highsmith via the Library of Congress

Mrs. Ellison hadn’t expected half the town to congregate in the park like an after-church buffet, but as her girlfriend told her nothing about the man she was meeting beyond “He seem alright, you can’t believe everything you read online,” the old woman was grateful for so many watchful eyes. Passing through a motley of tweed suits and floral hem dresses, her granddaughter, Rosie, started to moan, dropping her plush tiger and flapping her hands. Mrs. Ellison picked up and slapped the dust off that old cat whispering “Hush chile” and fixed Rosie’s hat to obscure the top half of her face. She reached her arm out to grab Miss Rosie’s hand and, remembering the girl didn’t like to be touched, pulled it away mid-motion and placed it firmly on her own hip as if about to reprimand the passing crowd. On a haggard bench she saw the outline of the blue suit and tan hat the man said he would be wearing. An erratic and shaking loafer. He looked about forty. A handsome forty. A childless forty that stayed out of the sun, went easy on liquor, with a hairline that could only be won through the genetic lottery or a physician in Turkey. He sat hunchbacked with a leather briefcase in his lap, too absorbed by his phone to see her standing there. The hem of his slim-fitted suit pants clung to thin legs that looked as if they might snap at any moment beneath an unseen weight.

“Excuse me, sir. Are you that journalist?” asked Mrs. Ellison. She felt foolish referring to him by his occupation and not his name. Her memory failed her more and more lately, and names — not recipes, thank goodness — were its first casualty.

He made no reply. With his lip curled under two teeth he gazed into his handheld abyss scrolling recent articles.

She looked over his shoulder and the name he was searching jogged her memory. This time she tapped his shoulder. “Excuse me, Mr. Toby Mackwell?”

He jumped when she tapped his shoulder and stood up with an insistent grin. “You must be Mrs. Ellison,” he said, outstretching his hand. His almond shaped eyes lay muted against otherwise animated features. He had a neck that jutted out as if trying to observe something that was always crawling away and in his thin drawn face was a boyishness long forsaken by men decades younger than he.

She shook his hand and got a slight chill, letting her arm hang limp as she withdrew. She pulled out a handkerchief and wiped Rosie’s mudstained hands as the girl stared at him as though he were a zoo animal leaning against the glass enclosure. “This here’s my granddaughter. I’d have put her on a plane but she don’t travel alone, and I can’t sit more than two hours at a time.”

“All the better,” said Toby. “Too many Americans in your situation don’t have the luxury of air travel. This story is for them too.” He looked back at Rosie. “And how old is this one?”

“Mentally, doctors put her around five or six. I been taking care of her for twenty-five years, ever since my daughter run off with that cornpop . . . .” She shook her head as to cut herself off telling this story for the hundredth time. “Well, I guess not the whole time. I let her out of my sight, leaving her in that facility. But you already know about that.” Mrs. Ellison set down her walker and sat on the paint-chipped bench, fanning herself with her lavender felt hat.

Toby mustered the best mix of stoicism and compassion in his face that he could. “If I could just scrape the scum right off this Earth,” he rehearsed to the wind, “I’d scrape it down to its rotten roots. I’d scrape it down with my bare hands.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” said Mrs. Ellison, resting her arms on the walker. She could see the top half of the courthouse a half-mile away, and next door to that was the ice cream shop Miss Rosie always loved. Ice cream hardly elicited the same excitement in Rosie as it did before, and as Mrs. Ellison’s knees flared up, the walk seemed less worthwhile.

“Now let me tell you this. Day of the 2021 election, a young girl missing over two weeks found in some decrepit shack in Neshoba County,” he paused for effect. “Skinned alive. The man was caught wearing half a jacket made of her tanned hide. Didn’t even finish making a whole one. Organs removed, heart sliced in quarters, set right on an ashtray beside the corpse.” He held two fingers up and swung them down in a chopping motion, exhaled and shook his head. “Just goes to show. Men will travel two counties wearing a woman’s skin before ever walking a mile in her shoes.” He became bashful when he saw the confusion in Mrs. Ellison’s face, a budding actor’s shyness after hamming up an audition.

Mrs. Ellison sat on the rotted bench hunched over and studied him, silently weighing her options for the fifth time today. All of her relatives were dead or on the other side of the country. She could hardly drive herself to the grocery store, nevermind Illinois. Rosie might have been able to handle a train ride to Florida if the other passengers could handle her, but if she was any further along than six weeks, there wasn’t a thing any clinic in Florida could do for her. The man before her provided the only path she could afford.

Toby cleared his throat. “Did they ever find the person responsible?”

The old woman shook her head. “The residential director said they’d do a full internal investigation. I done got the police involved thinking maybe they should do the investigation and they as worthless as the staff. Hospital said half the staff had quit between now and the time it happened and they couldn’t track everyone down. Couldn’t have been none of the caretakers they said, ‘Oh no, not with they kinds of background checks.’ I tell them I don’t give two sticks who was doing they background checks. I said, ‘You tell me who’s been in the room with her these last two months, I’ll be the one to sort em out.’” She gripped her walker and looked at Rosie, sitting in muddy grass playing with her plush tiger. She had that look of nausea again. Mrs. Ellison had one last facial cloth in her purse. “If you really want to do this, I don’t have but fifty dollars for gas. I’ll tell you that before we leave.”

“Don’t even think of it. A thousand things trouble my mind. Money’s not one of them.” Toby said, smiling.

“Good, cause I ain’t got none.”

“I can promise you when my piece comes out, a new kind of hell will rain on that facility. I do believe a lawsuit will be in order, with the public firmly on your side. Come along.” He motioned down the road to the parking lot.

“There needs to be plenty of space in the back so she can sit in the middle. I don’t want her banging her head against the side windows,” said Mrs. Ellison. “Don’t pay it any mind, I been handling her most her life. She’s just trying to do the most with the least, like the rest of us.”

---

The drive was hardly as difficult as expected. They would stop every two hours so Mrs. Ellison could walk some, but Toby didn’t mind stretching his legs out himself. She asked him not to use Rosie’s real name in his article and he had no problem with that, he just hoped she might let him take some photos. He would have to take them himself as there were no real photographers amongst his remaining friends and contacts. He paid for Ellison's motel room and a separate one for himself, but not before considering sleeping in his car to further his statement. Toby hadn’t touched social media since his falling out at Bluffington Post but now was the time. He tweeted: “My heart is shattered. A young woman, severely disabled, will not be allowed an abortion in her home state after being assaulted in the facility responsible for her care. I’m driving her across the country to get the care she needs. This is America.” He poured himself a glass of wine when he got to his room and sighed, of mourning or relief, he didn’t know. He added a couple flourishes before posting. “This. Is. America.”

Things were going to be better. He could feel it. This odyssey would show the world the real Toby Mackwell. It might take more than one article for a real comeback, but he would one day soon be able to google his name again without the words “forcing” or “misconduct” littering every headline. Surely one or two incidents with an intern couldn’t define his whole legacy. He emptied his glass in two swallows and poured himself another, closer to the brim, and sat back on the stiff motel chair.

The phone rattled the glass table and a notification appeared. A retweet and two replies already. His spirits lifted and his thoughts once again shifted towards the future, his long term legacy. He replayed and modified quotes he had long ago invented of other people’s future commentary.“He wrote with a ferocity and compassion unmatched in his generation, comparable only with the likes of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. And like those legendary journalists before him, he lived a complicated life fighting his own demons as hard as he fought systems of oppression.” . . . “I knew when I first laid eyes on him that this was no ordinary man. Looking back, I must have only said the things I said because deep down I knew I couldn’t have him.” . . . “He not only exposed the monsters running our political system, but could do so while deftly encapsulating the American condition with empathy and wit like no other, all in a single sentence.” . . . “It is the curse of all prodigious men to have at least some skeletons in their closets, and Toby Mackwell was no exception.” Lost in his reverie, he danced in the kitchen as “Distant Past” by Everything Everything played from his iPhone and he drained the last of the wine. His trance was broken when he received a call from the landline informing him of a noise complaint and he soberly pulled back the sheets of his bed and laid down.

Still restless, he checked his Twitter (he would not refer to it by any other name) for any reaction to his tweet. “Makes sense this time you’d pick someone incapable of calling the police.” The phone smacked the wall and reverberated throughout the unit. 103 likes for a comment made half an hour ago. Jesus fuck. He knew he was long overdue for a piece about online trolls and their threat to democracy, but that would have to wait. Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

The next morning, Toby offered to take the Ellisons to the drive-thru before continuing on the long desolate expanse, but Mrs. Ellison told him that Rosie wouldn’t eat fast food in the morning and that she herself was too old to take lip from some teenager who refused to put the pickles on the side. “I ain’t the one had raised them, and I ain’t the one to suffer them,” she said, spoon-feeding Rosie a cup of strawberry yogurt as they merged onto the highway. Rosie had been quiet on the drive but Mrs. Ellison assured him that she gave her her fair share of hell earlier in the morning back in the motel, and even fresher hell for the cleaning lady after a bout of morning sickness. Every so often Toby would catch Rosie’s glimpse in the rearview mirror and she looked at him like a rat that might snatch her up and scurry off.

Most of the drive looked the same: gas stations and Waffle Houses, water towers and money lenders, dilapidated tin houses towered by jacked-up Fords; sentries of an ancient land standing watch over its ruins, marking for attack enervate conquistadors studded with laptops and neckties beneath murky waters and hanging moss. Out on the highway swamp, Toby too felt like a mark.

He said it was a special kind of hell that took a special kind of people to live here. That he often wondered what century that he was in anytime he passed through this region. Mrs. Ellison said the people here were no different than she or him. He remarked that it was the sorts of people living here that voted in the people who made this drive necessary in the first place. That she might have any compassion left for these people meant she was a far gentler soul than he.

“I hold no brief against any of these people,” said Mrs. Ellison. “I was one of them.” Toby went silent and a little pale.

“Before any of this happened, I thought the same way they did. And to tell you the truth, I still do. If you think I ain’t struggled with this the whole way . . . .” Mrs. Ellison sighed and looked down at her wrinkled palms. “There was two things my mama used to tell me back when I was a child, over and over. The first was that cussing was for lowlifes and scoundrels. The second was that you don’t get to turn your nose up at anyone’s shit until you clean your own ass.” She closed her eyes, trying to conjure up the memory of the stern but vibrant woman as if restoring an old photo left too long out in the sun. “Seventy-nine years on this earth and God still reminds me I don’t know nothing more than no one else.”

They had been on the road two days when Toby felt the buzz of his phone vibrate and saw the ghost of a name. Spencer Blake. The name made his stomach jump through his chest. He wouldn’t dare call him back unless he was alone. Twenty miles until the next gas station. His palms turned to goo and the wheel wobbled as they glistened with sweat. “Say, it’s been a while since we pulled over. How about we take this next rest stop?”

The truck stop was the only visible sign of civilization for miles. They walked in and were greeted with aromas of frying chicken and catfish. The kitchen was visible from the entryway and scribbled on a blue sheet of parchment paper taped onto the cash register was the specials of the day: 3 piece chicken and two sides for $10.95, 3 piece catfish and two sides for $13.95. Choice of fries, beans, or collards. Mrs. Ellison pulled out two stools at the counter and asked if they had any milkshakes. Milkshakes always calmed Miss Rosie’s nerves. The man behind the counter said no but she could have any ice cream she desired in the freezer and it was on the house.

Toby said to put everything on his tab and stepped outside in the damning heat.

“Spencer,” he said, more jittery than intended. His phone trembled in his hand as he held it to his ear.

“Toby. It’s been a while,” said the man on the other end. “Look, I know we didn’t leave things off on the best note.”

“You mean after you threw me out on my ass? Because of a few baseless accusations?” Toby could feel his anxiety turning into rage.

“I’m not calling to rehash any of that. I’m calling to throw you a bone.”

Real fucking generous of you to finally think of that. Toby grinded his teeth on his knuckle and bit down. “Okay,” he said after a deep breath. “What is it?”

“Are you still in Mississippi?”

Toby looked out at his barren surroundings. It had been an hour since they crossed the Tennessee border. “Yeah, I’m still in Mississippi.”

“How would you like to take down Mike Davidson?”

The question didn’t even register at first. Who wouldn’t want to take down Mike Davidson? With his evangelical ramblings and the Roe overturning still fresh in the headlines, he made a fine antagonist for the Bluffington Post. His public lamentations of the pill on “American values” had been godsend in an otherwise slow newsweek. With Roe overturned only two months before, fears of the religious right’s next target titillated American imaginations like a 21st-century The War of the Worlds.

“It’s your lucky day then,” Spencer said. “Just got a hot tip from our mole in his campaign. He’s throwing a big party in his mansion in Jackson tonight for the donors. Hookers, blow, the whole nine yards. If I give you the address, can you get some photos?”

Toby stood frozen, disbelieving.

“Just anything you can get,” Spencer continued. “Anyone leaving the mansion. Anyone going in. Off-color racial remarks. Mike Davidson snorting coke off a hooker’s ass. Anything.”

“Why me? After everything?”

“Toby, I know we’ve had our problems but we go back a long way. I’m giving this to you because it's the best I can do for you right now. The party’s about to get going in two hours and will probably go on til about midnight. Just get to the mansion and blend in.”

Toby’s mouth bobbed open and shut like a fish.

“You do this, you’re on your way to becoming a hero again. Are you in?”

“Of course I’m in.”

“Hey Toby? We’re still the good guys. Don’t forget that.”

The line went dead and Toby’s jaw was still on the ground. Six hours to get to Jackson nonstop. It would be another seven before he could even get the Ellisons back to Chicago, assuming Mrs. Ellison didn’t need to keep stopping every two hours. Then if headed straight back to Jackson, it would take another twelve hours minimum. He kicked the icebox and clutched foot when it failed to rattle. Then he sat down for several minutes trying to regain his composure.

He limped back inside and angrily exhaled as he sat at the counter. Someone said, “You alright there, honey?” It was a woman about fifty with curly bromine hair, inch long fingernails, and a nasally Tennessee accent that might have been pleasant on a less hungover afternoon. She was standing behind the counter serving Rosie a small plate of yams. “Is that one yours?” she asked.

“Not by blood, but I am responsible for her,” said Toby. “Terrible circumstances, that one.”

“She’s got the most innocent broad head,” she said giddily. “Truly a thing of beauty. Why, that head is so perfect I can paint an entire portrait atop it.” Rosie flapped her arms and swiped the plate off the counter, the crash heard across the room. Toby went to pick up yams spilled on the floor but the lady said nevermind that, she had it. As she cleaned up the mess, Toby told her Rosie’s story, where they were going, and why. A look of horror came across the woman’s face.

“Why that just makes me sick to my stomach,” she said.

“I learned about this last week,” Toby said. “But it didn’t surprise me. I’ve long foreseen the direction this country was headed for the last six years.”

“Just an awful, awful world we live in.” She shook her head. “To think that poor girl is being forced to murder an innocent child.” She threw her dishrag against the counter. “You ought to be ashamed.”

When Mrs. Ellison came out of the ladies room, Toby paid for their meals and she led Rosie by the hand back to the car. Rosie screamed when she got outside and wanted nothing to do with getting back in that car again. Toby filled up the tank and they then left the station, passing a sign that said NO STOPS FOR THIRTY MILES.

“Mrs Ellison,” he began. “We’ve been driving so long. Wouldn’t you like a night off? You and Rosie can stay in town for a day. Get your bearings before finishing such a long stretch of travel.”

“What good would that do? Rosie don’t like this town any more than this here car. The sooner we get to Chicago, the better.”

“Maybe if she just got to run around in the fresh air a little more. Or maybe a movie? I can give you money for the cinema. Pick you back up tomorrow at noon and be back on our way. Wouldn’t Rosie like that?”

“Oh honey . . . .” Mrs. Ellison shook her head. “You think this girl is gonna sit quiet at a movie? Bless.”

Toby cursed Spencer for giving him this news so late. Why couldn’t he have known the day before? Or even a few hours earlier? Was the universe just tossing him a carrot he was never supposed to reach? Mrs. Ellison noticed the change in his disposition immediately. Toby was going twenty miles over the limit and angrily swerved to pass anyone on the same road as him.

On the right hand side of the road on a large hill of grass stood the remnants of a white church with only three walls remaining. The front had fallen off and the insides of it were burned to a char. His eyes brightened and he pulled over onto the grass and drove deep into the valley.

“This is a perfect picture opportunity. What could be more symbolic?” He pulled up to the church and stepped out of his car. Digging through the trunk, he found his briefcase and pulled out a camera and walked out towards the chapel. Mrs. Ellison followed him out feeling like a fly on a drunk mule’s ass. He motioned her to stand in the center of the chapel as he played with the settings on his camera.

“I’m supposed to stand over there? That thing would topple right over me,” said Mrs. Ellison.

“It’s perfect. Witches! Risen from the remnants of liturgy’s past. Outliving the blood watered soil of the evil empire. Raining judgment upon those that take up its old banners . . . .”

“I know you did not just call me no witch.”

“This is for you. This is for Rosie. This is for all others made to suffer under the radicalization of America.”

Mrs. Ellison kicked a centipede off the toe of her shoe. “At least let me go put my walker over there. For all I know I might kick the bucket tomorrow and this be my last photo.”

Toby pulled the walker from the trunk and placed it beneath the weathered steeple where wild shrub clung to his knees. “This will be your grandest moment.”

“Let’s make it quick then,” said Mrs. Ellison. “I wanna be going.” She led Rosie to the center of the chapel where the wild grass rose above her elbows. Mrs. Ellison told her she wasn’t taking that toy tiger with and threw it behind the seat against the rear window. Toby said it was alright, she can hold her tiger for the photo, and it might be better if she did. But Mrs. Ellison said she wasn’t going to have her adult granddaughter holding no toy in a photoshoot.

He stood about twelve feet back and zoomed in just close enough for the bombed out arches to fill out the frame. He snapped a picture. Then another. He studied them carefully and shook his head. “I’m going to try planting the camera on top of the car. See if I get a better angle.”

Mrs. Ellison rolled her eyes but stood upright without her walker, holding Rosie by the arm.

He planted the camera on top of the car and took another shot. “Dammit!” He took on an exasperated countenance. “Photography isn’t my profession, I’m afraid. Let me get back another twenty feet.”

“Don’t know as I can stand too long without my walker,” Mrs. Ellison said.

“Just one more shot.” Toby jumped back in the car. He planted his forehead on the steering wheel and started the engine as he exhaled. The sun glared with knowing through the window and sweat glazed the steering wheel gripped in his hand. He put the stick in reverse and carefully backed up five feet, ten feet. He opened the sun roof and stood up, the camera stuttering in his palm.

“Alright now, you finish up!” Mrs. Ellison’s expression could hardly be seen, but Toby zoomed in, and her confused irritation seemed to take on a knowing unease. He flipped the camera shut and pulled himself back into the driver’s seat. He put the car back in reverse and slid through the maze of beech trees. When he got twenty feet back, Mrs. Ellison shouted something he couldn’t hear above the engine and started after him.

He shifted to drive and the car jerked forward, spraying red dirt in the air like hadean mists and Mrs. Ellison began walking towards, then quickening her pace a little too quick, fell face forward in the leaves. She cried out again, and Toby cranked the radio up until the static blocked any particle of her agony from reaching his ear. After he cleared out of the woods, Rosie broke out into a run and became like a small animal left on the side of the road shrinking to the size of a bug in his rearview mirror, as her plush tiger looked back at her from the rear window.

He sped south down the highway towards Jackson and heavy rain came down threatening to wash him down the same valley he just came from. He decided he would have to drown if he didn’t make it to Jackson. Nothing else would stop him. Still he felt more and more depressed as he blazed down the highway. He turned on his high beams as the road dropped into flooding fields, determined not to look up at the clouds as if he might see the faces staring down on him. The clouds folded into each other oozing black and formless, the rain antediluvian. He didn’t even realize Mrs. Ellison’s walker was still in the car until he crossed the state line. He sped faster against the setting sun peaking over the hill, playing no music the whole way there, only static. The right side of history was just over the horizon.

---

It was before 11:20 at night when he made it into Jackson. Despite having ample time before anyone left the party, he sped through red lights and cut off anyone in his desired lane no matter how much time he had to move over. He slowed down through the main business district so he wouldn’t get pulled over. He made it to the address six miles out in a residential area filled with Victorian mansions guarded by electric gates. When he turned on Mike Davidson’s street, he hit the brakes and the car came to a screeching halt. He could tell by the commotion he was already too late.

He stepped out of the car. A large group of people were gathered around and red and blue lights flashed on every house. He moved past the crowd and a police officer yelled at him to get back. “This is a crime scene!”

“It’s okay! I’m a reporter!” Toby shouted back through the rain. He pulled out his camera as if it were a press pass.

“I don’t care if you’re Dolly Parton, back behind the yellow line!” The officer glared at him past his black mustache and behind him two bodies were splayed out, one on top of the other in the shape of a cross. With an icy shudder, Toby thought they were the faces of the Ellisons, but a second look revealed a man and a woman in their mid-twenties. Small streams trickling down the pavement from their wounds made them both appear to be crying. The officer walked back towards the car and a sickly man with thin wiry hair and a wifebeater sat handcuffed in the backseat thrashing and screaming something inaudible.

“What happened here?” he asked a kid in a varsity jacket beside him.

“Lover’s quarrel. That guy they arrested said he caught his woman cheating but everyone else say he was her ex. I guess she left him for that other guy lying next to her.”

Mike Davidson stood off to the side with two cameras in his face, somehow regal in his late night bathrobe, making an impassioned speech full of grandiose hand gestures chastising the city’s leadership for crime run amok. He declared he and he alone would clean the city up as a couple people around him cheered. There was not a soul on that street less bothered by all the media attention than Mike, and no signs of hookers or bags of blow to be found.

Toby threw his camera to the ground and stomped it.

“What’s the matter with you?” said the kid.

Toby stopped and tried to compose himself. Looking at the two bodies and the man in the car, he let out a small laugh. “It’s just the world. All the scum of the world. I tell you, if I could just scrape it out, even with my bare hands . . . .” He stopped.

“What is it?”

The kid’s voice seemed to fade with the memories of the Ellisons as Toby turned toward the police car catching a fleeting glance of the suspect, the downward eyes cloaked with matted hair. He felt lighter as he moved towards this creature, as if titanium epaulets fell off from shoulders with each step and the blood pooling under the two crossed lovers was washing him clean from behind the police tape. The officer shouted for Toby to stay back from the vehicle but all was inaudible as the killer lifted his head and met his gaze. In those strained and insensate eyes, Toby remembered what he had been looking for all along.

He would be clean. Again like before, he would be clean.

Adam Pearson lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he tinkers with his novel and writes the Substack newsletter The Pensive Pejorative.