Calling Me Home (35 page)

“There was a rope. They tied my hands and ankles together—one big knot, me laying over on my side. One of them, he wanted to gag me, but Jack said, ‘No, I want to hear this coon scream. I want him to scream good.’ I knew then what I had coming wasn’t going to be no picnic. I could only pray I’d come out alive.”

As his words came faster, Robert sounded more like the boy I’d known so long ago.

“One of the other guys was stirring up a fire I hadn’t paid any attention to until then. He called over to Jack, said it was good and hot. I started sweating, wondering what were they going to do. Burn me alive? I would have preferred hanging to being a human barbecue. And I’m not too proud to admit I begged for mercy then. I cried like a baby. I thought I was going to die.”

Tears covered my cheeks, but I didn’t move a muscle or make a noise. Robert was in front of me—100 percent alive—yet I felt the terror, as if it were happening now, as if it were happening to me, too.

He released a breath through his nose. “They had something else in mind. Jack said, ‘Go get the thing out of the car.’ Patrick returned with a long metal tool, like a fire poker. I didn’t know what they were going to do. Rape me with it? Blind me? What? When I think what could have happened, I guess I was lucky. Jack took it from Patrick and went to the fire. Then I figured it out. It was a branding iron.”

I gasped.

“Jack heated it up, a big thick glove on his hand—I knew how hot it was going to be when he couldn’t handle it bare-fisted. It glowed orange-white. I shivered, the temperature of my body ice-cold now compared to what I knew was coming. ‘Scared, boy?’ he asked. When I didn’t respond, he walked over and kicked me in the kidneys.

“‘Yes,’ I finally spit out when I stopped coughing.

“‘Yes, what?’ he said.

“‘Yes, suh.’

“‘That’s better. Now, boy, this here will be a reminder—in case you ever think about even looking at a white woman again, hear?’

“I nodded. ‘Yes, suh.’

“‘And any white woman who dares to look at an animal like you will be punished, too.’ I jerked my face up, and Jack stared me down. I don’t think the others knew, except Patrick. They never spoke your name, but Jack meant they’d hurt you, too. It killed me, thinking of them touching you in any way, punishing you because of me.

“Jack said, ‘This won’t hurt at all—you’re an animal, after all. A big hairy animal who can’t keep his hairy thing in his pants around white women.’ Pardon my language, but that’s what he said, only not so politely.

“The others laughed along with him. But I wasn’t laughing. Not then, not when he jabbed the iron hard into my side, into the thin skin of my rib cage. Last thing I remember before passing out was the sizzle and smell of my own flesh cooking.”

I pressed my hand to my mouth, afraid I might vomit. I backed into one of the metal chairs on our porch—chairs with shell-shaped backs and seats, which Max had painted cheery yellow. The yellow made me even more nauseous, and I shielded my eyes from the empty one. Robert stepped close, bent on a knee, and continued in a low, quiet voice.

“Next thing I remember, I’m waking up where they tossed me out of the car somewhere in those woods. They’d untied me, but I could barely stand from the pain in my side. I crawled, following the sound of trickling water until I found a slow-moving creek. I tore a strip off my trousers and soaked it in the water and held it to my skin, though I could hardly stand it. I hoped the cool water would take away a little of the pain. It was almost dark by then. I lay by that creek all night, wondering if they’d killed me after all—just a slower death.

“I woke the next morning to a voice asking was I okay. I was never so relieved in all my life to see the face of an old Negro peering into mine. I showed him the letter burned into my side.
A
, for animal. He carried me in his wagon to Momma. They’d left me less than a mile from the house, barely across the line from Shalerville. I only stayed a few days, until I was strong enough to work. Nell took word to my boss. I was lucky he didn’t fire me.

“Why they chose that time or place, after all those months … I guess I’ll never know. But it changed me. I lost my nerve. But then, after I joined up, after I spent months dealing with all kinds of guys who thought they were better than they were, I got it back. I believed again. I found the courage. And I wanted to find the means to get you away from there—from them. To keep you safe no matter what they threatened. Then I found out you were already gone. And that
you
gave up, too, Isa.”

I kept my eyes averted, focusing through my tears on the dimples in the concrete of the porch. He was right. What I’d said about waiting and watching? It was mostly a lie. I had given up. Without so much as a fight after I lost our baby. Doing nothing, when I could have sought him out once I’d left my childhood home. I’d given up, believing Nell’s hints that he’d moved on.

I’d believed what the world told me. I’d
surrendered
.

Robert reached to cup my chin, to force me to look up. “But I’m here now. You’re here now. And I still have this. It proves you’re married to me, not him.” Robert gestured toward the door, then pulled a slip of paper from his chest pocket.

I recognized the document, the leaf so thin, you could see the sun through it if you held it up to the sky. I said, “My mother had our marriage annulled.”

He shook his head. “Not as far as I’m concerned. I swore to love you until the day I died.”

“It’s no good.” As horrified as I was at the story he’d just told me, as sick as I was at the thought of what my brothers had done to the man I loved, as nauseous as I felt at their threats, my voice still emerged sullen. His declarations were useless—no matter how genuinely he felt them. No matter how I wanted to believe them. It had turned me into a hateful mess.

“We could take this piece of paper, Isabelle. Take it where people will respect it and leave us in peace.”

“There’s no such place. And you’re leaving again.”

“I’ll find that place. But first, I’ll take you where you can wait for me and I’ll come back to you. I promise.”

I allowed myself to contemplate the idea. If I left, Max would surely hate me. And though Robert held our marriage certificate, my mother’s actions had made it good for nothing but the scrap pile.

Yet I had made those same vows. His suggestion that he could find a safe place for us made my heart leap in a song it hadn’t sung in years. More than anything, I wanted Robert.

“Isa?” He rose from his knee, again using the nickname only he had ever called me. And it was too much.

I rose, too, and flung myself at him. Without looking to see whether a neighbor watched or if a stranger passed by on an errand, I threw my head against his chest, my tears freed, hot, ugly sobs bubbling from deep in my lungs, where I’d buried them too long.

When I’d spent my fury and frustration at my choices, I laid my cheek against the heavy cloth of Robert’s uniform shirt. My tears had left damp spots on its starched surface.

Robert held me for a time. Then he slid a hand up my arm and lifted my chin with his finger until I looked straight at him, at those oak-colored eyes I’d believed I’d never see again. At his strong jawbone, so freshly shaved it appeared as smooth as the skin of his lips.

I reached toward him and our mouths collided, as though we’d both been wandering, searching a midnight desert for the last thing that could save us.

I stepped back, tugging him along with me, pulled the screen door open, and stepped inside our house, my house and Max’s.

The thought stopped me less than a heartbeat. Long enough to tell myself a lie: that Max was an unimportant variable in this strange new equation.

We kissed—no, we devoured one another—through the living room, the hallway, all the way to the doorway of the bedroom, where I paused and glanced at the simple bedstead Max had installed before bringing me to this room on our wedding night. I pushed away from the door frame and led Robert instead to the smaller second bedroom, where we’d set up a single bed.

My hesitation at the first door hadn’t gone unnoticed. Robert questioned me with his eyes and with one simple word: “Isabelle?”

I covered his mouth with my fingers, then led him to the narrow bed, where I sank down and lay back on the pillow, pulling him to me. I remembered the unlocked front door, wishing I’d thought to slide the bolt home. But Max wouldn’t return for hours, and he had a key—not to mention that a bolt couldn’t keep him from this, whatever it was. A betrayal of Max? When I’d already betrayed Robert with him?

I no longer cared.

It was no simple, innocent wedding night. No Robert afraid he might hurt me. No me shivering beneath my nightgown, hiding under a heavy quilt with nervous anticipation of the unknown. No half-child, half-grown boy and girl playing house, ignorant of what would destroy us so soon.

Our eyes were open.

My fingers hurried to unbutton the shirt that separated his flesh from mine, to push it away from his shoulders, even broader and stronger now than when the same muscles flexed to clear overgrowth from the brush arbor. I pressed my nose against his skin, inhaling everything I’d so bitterly missed. My hands trembled at the resistance of hipbones and long, lean tendons on the backs of his thighs. I shivered as he swept my blouse away from my ribs and unhooked my brassiere to expose my breasts to his mouth, then removed my plain skirt in a clumsy game of lift and tug until it fell next to the bed.

There was no gentle give-and-take in our lovemaking. It was all greed and haste and pressing toward something we couldn’t reach soon enough. Matching each other breath for breath. Climbing. Crying out when we reached it. Agony, exclamation, discordant harmony.

After, we lay half-dressed and tangled in the damp of sweat and remnants of our reunion, gasping to regain equilibrium in our lungs and slow the beating in our chests.

Robert wedged himself into the too-small space next to the wall and flung one arm above his head, the other across my chest, covering my nakedness with a stark stripe of skin against mine. I traced the angry scar on his side, over his ribs, purple and puckered, in the clear shape of the letter
A,
thinking of what he’d suffered because of me. But he lifted his hand and brushed my fingers away, as though the scar were irrelevant. Then he brushed his own fingertips against my abdomen, and I froze when they lingered in the shallow valleys of skin a shade lighter than the plateaus surrounding them—my own scars, the ones that could give away my secret. But he gazed across the room, and I knew he noted nothing beneath his fingertips and saw nothing in the room itself. Rather, he studied the situation, as we both did, in the motes that floated in the sunlight piercing us from the window.

We’d made another decision with our actions.

How could I continue my farce of a marriage after this? Every time Max and I had joined in subdued pleasure paled next to the passion Robert and I shared. Max would have to accept my mistake, acknowledge I’d compromised by burying my love for Robert under the guise of doing the right thing. I’d warned him I was no good for him.

Robert and I each straightened our own garments now, retrieving the cast-off pieces from the floor, silently buttoning and zipping ourselves back into everyday life.

When he asked if he could return—once he’d found that place for me to wait—the answer was clear. I stood in the shadow of my front porch, following him down the street with my gaze, as I’d done that morning with my husband.

36

Dorrie, Present Day

L
EAVING THE MESSAGE
for Teague had calmed my nerves, and the vision of Miss Isabelle and her reunion with Robert both buoyed me up and put me on edge. We headed out, with me in my dressy pants and top and Miss Isabelle in a sweet little dress that showed off the exquisite figure she still had at almost ninety years old. I’d developed a crush on that word the day before—nineteen across, ten letters: “delicately lovely.”
Exquisite.

We weren’t far from the funeral home—it was just across the river in Covington—and we were early. Miss Isabelle requested we make a detour on our way. She asked me to watch on either side of the river for a florist or an upscale grocery that might have a nice floral section.

“Don’t people usually send arrangements to the funeral home?” I asked. “Do people carry in flowers like that?” I wasn’t sure it was done.

“Dorrie, please humor me. I need flowers.”

We were lucky. Before you could spell Cincinnati ten times, right after we crossed the double-decker bridge into Covington, I spied a flower shop in an old building on Main Street. And lucky again—the store wouldn’t close for fifteen minutes.

“Are you going in?” I asked.

“No. Just get me a nice bunch of something simple and classy. Nothing fussy. A dozen.”

“Roses?” That seemed easy enough.

“Yes. Red roses, if they have them.”

“In a vase?”

“Just wrapped.”

Now I was really worried. What would they do with wrapped flowers at the funeral home? Maybe she was counting on the fact they’d have vases, or maybe she intended for someone to carry them home instead of leaving them. She was frugal, but not too cheap to splurge on a vase.

But I followed her directions, and soon I was back in the car, carefully settling the sleeve of flowers on the backseat so it wouldn’t get mangled when we started rolling. The clerk had bragged they’d been delivered at the end of the day. I’d gotten the pick, before anyone else had dug through them. They were gorgeous, and their sweet scent filled the car.

We pulled away from the curb and drove through the middle of Covington. The streets were lined with ancient buildings, some nice and fixed up, with open businesses, others vacant and run-down, with boarded-up windows. Then they became more residential. Tired old houses sat close to the street, mixed in with mom-and-pop businesses, bars, minimarts, and vacant lots where things had been torn down. I wondered why anyone would choose to live there, but then I’d spy a huge old historic house or school and I’d think how beautiful it must have been, and still could be, at any point in history. It reminded me of sections of Dallas and Fort Worth. Gradually, the color of the folks walking the streets shifted, though the setting remained the same. Miss Isabelle told me we were in Eastside, the historically African-American section of Covington. At a light, we pulled even with an old house that was now a funeral home.