Body and Bread (5 page)

When Norine returns, she holds something I can’t see.

“Beautiful,” Hugh says, stroking her arm.

Still, human females outdo them all, I think while I reach for the door knob: from painting their nipples and elongating their necks, to the Dayak girls in Borneo wearing corselets of rattan hoops covered with brass rings, silver and shells. Or American women who squeeze into denim.

When I turn from the doorway, Norine hands Debbie a fistful of wild rain-lily stalks. As I whisper, “
Cooperia pedunculata
, diminutive amaryllids,” I notice the child’s and mother’s same sorrel-colored hair and Norine’s stance, tilted forward, like her father’s.

My eyes close. Burning sage. Drumming? Shells jangle.

On my bed two hours later, I stir, groggy.

C
HAPTER 3

A
WEEK LATER,
I drive to Nugent, where I get lost trying to find Kurt’s house. Circling through the subdivision, I spot a familiar screened porch, a three-car garage with a basketball hoop, the street with a seventy-five-degree drop that neighborhood children coasted down on skateboards and bicycles. Bewildered (How does a person lose her brother’s house?), noticing the same orange front door for a third time, I skid to the curb midway through the next block.

I’d like to go through the front door, but my sister-in-law, Randy, would think that odd, so I head toward the back. As I latch the gate, two Doberman pinschers appear, their hatchet heads jerking with each chopped bark. Kurt has always owned big dogs, so I stroll toward the door, acting unfazed, convinced that he, Randy, or one of his two children is watching, that my ability to arrive unruffled might be a test, one I hope to pass.

Stooping, her thin leg a barricade, Randy wrestles the Dobermans away from the door. In the kitchen, cilantro, garlic, almond waft from a pot on the commercial range. Oriental lilies half fill a cut-glass vase; more lay on waxed paper, their perfume mixing with herbal steam. Silverware gleams in stacks on the granite counter. “Did I come at a bad time?” Maybe I have the appointment wrong. I thought Kurt said Saturday at 9:00.

“No, why?” Randy says, clipping a lily, sliding it into the arrangement. “It’s Supper Club, no biggie. Can I get you anything?” Her cell phone rings; she swivels as though stepping into a dance routine.

“Mom, you said…” Kurt Jr. whines while rounding the corner. He looks thirteen or fourteen, gangly, with droopy, obliging eyes.

“And I’ll say it again,” she interrupts. “You need a haircut.” She checks the oven. “Now tell your Aunt Sarah hello.” She tips her auburn head in my direction, finally answering her phone.

“Huh?” he says, scowling, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“You don’t remember me, but I’m your dad’s sister. The last time I saw you, you were a baby.”

“No way. I’d forgotten Dad had a sister. That’s totally weird,” he says, snickering, his insult meant as a compliment. I almost hug him.

“Hey!” Randy says, holding the receiver with one hand, snapping her fingers with the other. She checks her watch; the stove timer buzzes.

“What-ev-er…”

“Don’t be rude, mister.” Turning, Randy mumbles into the mouthpiece while walking to the pot; she stirs, adjusts the flame.

“Can we bail then, Mom?” he says, huffy. “Dad’ll kill me if I’m late.” He leans on one hip, his legs like stilts, his hands catcher’s mitts.

“Get your gear then,” she says, hanging up. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

I don’t say how familiar this scene feels. Spooky. “Is Kurt home? Was he expecting me?”

“Oh,” she says, checking her watch again. “He’s in his lair,” she sighs, stepping toward the doorway. “But we’ll have to hurry.”

Randy talks on her cell, reading from a folded piece of paper she’s pulled from her slacks pocket as we pass through labyrinthine halls. “Horseradish,” she says, “yes, two.” She points to a door. “I told you I saw them together last week,” she says, wheeling, disappearing back down the carpeted passageway.

Kurt sits cross-legged on the floor, next to his ten-year-old daughter, Emma, and behind a small transformer. A model train, its steam engine whistling, puffing smoke, whips over a track that winds under two bridges, through a tunnel, past houses, a diner, a loader that dumps miniature logs into one of the cars, and a gateman in blue overalls who comes out of his shanty waving a red lantern. Each time the train veers toward Emma, she kicks her feet, shuts her eyes, holds her ears. Kurt rests his hand on her back; she flinches, flapping her hands. “Here she comes,” he sings, “woo, woo.”

“Train,” Emma says, blinking. She rises, shrieking, and steps toward the swerving caboose. Was the layout for him or for her? Whichever, Kurt’s tenderness is the issue. Fate, with its inexorable aim, has pierced his seemingly invulnerable heart. Even his international connections can’t give his developmentally challenged daughter a normal life.

“Oh,” he says finally. “It’s you.” His face has lost its pudginess, but without glasses, he’s got his usual squint.

When the train stops, Emma flops to the floor, swaying, biting her hands. “Em,” Kurt says kneeling, “go work on your puzzle.” He waits, glancing down. “Your puzzle,” he says, leaning into her plank-like face. She walks to a small table next to the wall, fingers jigsaw pieces in a cardboard box.

Kurt sits at our father’s oak desk, checking inside one drawer after another. I take an armchair across from him. He wears jeans and a plaid cotton shirt whose faded red blocks and tight shoulders are familiar. Was it Sam’s?

“So let’s get this over with,” Kurt says, setting a box of shotgun shells and a bird whistle next to a kettle of bones Dad kept in the same spot. “I’m meeting Nyank at the farm in twenty minutes.”

“Nyank?” Kurt’s frankness is typical but never mean-spirited. “Do I know him?” The name sounds familiar.

“Wade,” he says. “Wade Nyank?” I frown, and he adds, “Sam’s friend. Remember him telling how Nyank almost lost his ear at 32 Bluffs?”

“Oh, yeah, how is he?” I guiltily resent Kurt knowing what seemed a confidence Sam had shared only with me.

“Okay, I guess.” Before I can ask how Kurt and Wade became buddies, he reminds me of why I’ve driven here. “You can’t come to the meeting with Terezie.” He shoves the whistle in his shirt pocket.

“What do you mean I
can’t
come?”

“Cut the crap, Sarah. You can’t join the game at halftime and expect to know which play to run.”

A football analogy. Sometimes I forget this is Texas. “
You
cut the crap, Kurt. A priest doesn’t deny counsel to a dying woman simply because she reminds him of his sins.”

He stands and walks to his gun cabinet. “I’m sure that was your version of an insult,” he says, taking out a 12-gauge, cracking open the stock. “You honestly think you’re the expert.” The gun snaps shut. “Here,” he says. “Catch.”

“No,” I call, but the weapon is already airborne, so I grab the handle with one hand, the pump with the other, clutching the contraption to my chest. “This better not be loaded,” I say. I lay it on top of the desk and sit back, rubbing my eyes.

“Like I said, you’re no expert.”

“Expert on what?”

“On Sam.”

“That’s absurd. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“No, it’s important. It’s the reason you shouldn’t come to the meeting.”

“That won’t work, Kurt. Nothing’s going to keep me from being in that room.”

“You think Sam told you everything, don’t you? Well, he didn’t. You act like you’re the smart one, battling us poor morons.” He leans close. “Trust me. There are some things you
don’t
know.”

I want to say,
and some things you don’t know either
. “I don’t get it. Could you be a bit more specific?”

Kurt taps my shoulder. “You’re
not
the only person he was close to.”

“Look,” I say standing, “if you know something that affects Cornelia’s situation, you’re morally obligated to reveal it.”

He squints, picks up the gun and walks to Emma. “Let’s see if Mom’s home,” he says, and Emma rises. He follows her to the doorway, so I shoulder my purse. “As far as Cornelia’s concerned, you don’t need to get your panties in a wad. She’ll have her transplant; you can bet on it. ‘Cause Terezie’s going to sign our agreement, guaranteed. Then we’ll all shake hands and trot politely back to our corners.”

C
HAPTER 4

1961

W
HEN MY GRANDFATHER
leased his new farm in 1910 to tenants—Antonín Cervenka, his wife and four children—the family hired Otis Settle to help them grow corn and cotton and tend turkeys, Durac hogs, White-faced Herefords. My grandfather admired Otis’ agricultural knowledge and his stamina, even at fifty-seven, while bundling cornstalks or swabbing the cattle’s occasional lesions. But Otis’ childhood years as a slave to Sam Houston, captor of Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto, first president of the Republic of Texas, so impressed my grandfather that he hired Otis to be the janitor of his medical partnership’s new hospital. Since Otis’ wage was almost double the one he’d received from the Cervenkas, they wished him well, never acknowledging the hardship his leaving must have caused. My grandfather moved Otis behind his house into a cottage that before the Civil War had housed field slaves. Ten years later, Otis’ seventeen-year-old bride, Ruby, moved in and worked as my grandparents’ maid.

During the early 1950s, my grandfather would coax Otis, who was then in his nineties, to describe his years as Houston’s servant. “Oh, no, Doctor, shame on you,” he’d say. The older Otis got, the more he spoke to my grandfather in exaggerated dialect. He’d shake his white head, his mouth disappearing behind a white mustache, his black eyebrows balancing his light-toned face. People guessed his age at around seventy. “Don’t you know,” he’d add, “these poor people gots to be tired of an old man’s gibberish?” Then he’d disappear. Unfazed, my grandfather would point toward the empty hallway. “Abigail and I,” he’d say, “are now blessed to have this good and faithful servant taking care of our family.” He actually said it:
servant
.

That Otis was not the person I knew. He taught my brothers and me to make whistles from blades of grass, the vibrations tickling, and to fertilize plants with eggshells and limp banana peels splayed like starfish under the surface soil. He showed Sam how to feed a baby pigeon with an eyedropper, and how to fold an origami dove with wings that flapped when he pulled the tail. He also told me his Master Sam stories, memories no one else mentioned and I kept to myself. Now, I hope they weren’t revisions, given condescendingly, like he would have to my grandfather to accommodate an expected version of his life. After all, my fascination with his slave experience was, to say the least, imprudent. I longed for a connection to a historical figure. And I wanted to know why Otis could be devoted to his slave owner but contemptuous of my grandfather, a man I’d been taught to revere.

Two of Otis’ stories were favorites, and I’d often beg for them. “Not now, child,” he’d always begin. “Don’t bother an old man.” But that was his signal for me to plead. I’d pull him a chair, usually at the backyard wrought iron table, and he’d sit, then poke at one of his hearing aids, his tongue clicking as loud as a mockingbird. Sometimes, he’d tell me to get Sam, but Sam was always off somewhere with Kurt.

In his first story, the chief of a Texas branch of the Coushatta tribe complained about the Confederate government’s mandatory draft, which forced Native Americans to travel to Virginia to fight in a war they didn’t understand. “Chief Billie Blount brung along twenty of his men, and Master Sam, he met them down at the big spring,” Otis would say. We shucked corn, throwing husks into a bucket, or his fist—the knuckles gray as if mud had caked there—whittled a piece of mesquite, his pocketknife curling thin strips into wooden bows. “Mrs. Houston wouldn’t allow them to step foot into her house ’cause she never forgot about that princess of his.”

Otis couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk about Houston’s previous years with the Cherokees in Arkansas, except to say that his hero had become a chief and had married the first wife. I imagined Houston, his face streaked in red and yellow paint, wearing a headdress, leading his whooping men down a ravine into battle while smoke rose amidst the shuffle of hooves. Years later, I read that the princess-wife had been Will Rogers’ ancestor and that the general’s adventure had apparently included a protracted drinking and peyote binge. Nothing in my research, however, reconciled Otis’ devotion. Houston had been a colorful figure all right, but he’d refused to give my friend his freedom.

“After they’d smoked,” Otis continued, “I brung Master Sam his foolscap paper, and a big pot of pokeweed ink, and his pen he’d made out of a eagle feather.” Otis drew a large S in the air, for Sam, certainly, but I couldn’t help but think, Sarah. “He sat hisself right there and wrote a letter to the folks in Virginia, telling how wrong it was for anybody to steal away them Indian boys.” Lucky Otis, I thought, to have known such a person, a real live John Wayne.