Drink for the Thirst to Come (21 page)

Who could sleep after that? Anyway, the night was still hot and horrible. They waited until they heard Lady Cal, the colored lady, come to do for the Toziers, preparing breakfast, firing the stove to full heat for the day’s hot meal at lunch. The girls jumped to their clothes and ran down for the grits to be set to boil, the coffee to be perked, and cousin Rafe’s chicory to be steeped. Barbary Ann set a while and talked with Lady Cal. She talked about Lady Cal’s son, about the awful hot weather, about the best way to make poultice…

M’lissa Trish hovered by the stove. Finally, Lady Cal turned and said, “Give that pot a stir now, so it don’t thicken to a lump!” Into the chicory Melissa poured the contents of her envelope.
If this is a film,
Melissa thought as she poured,
today, just today, someone else’ll decide for that stuff. Someone else’ll get struck down by my revenge.
She swallowed hard as she poured.
Maybe even my own self.

But that morning it was just Rafe tucked full of chicory and swallowed down the charm of spider taken in the full of the moon. By that his soul was doomed to come wandering. The girls knew it. They giggled through breakfast, bit the insides of their cheeks so not to bust with laughing. Rafe stared and made faces, no idea in heck what those darn girls were about.

M’lissa and B.A. cringed at one another other during the noon hot-meal and by cold supper were half-asleep and had pretty much forgotten it all. Except that evening, M’lissa Trish noticed a knothole in the wall above the stove, high up near the lathe-work ceiling. From the varnished pine knot, a pair of furry brown spider legs dangled into the dim light of the kitchen’s single bulb. The leg stayed through the meal.

That’s right
, Melissa Patricia remembered,
that is right. SOMEbody’s soul has been caught. SOMEbody’s.

Then there was that awful war, the Second World War. By the time M’lissa Trish returned to the south, grown into a lady (but not by much), Rafe Tozier was gone and dead, killed in the Pacific Theater of Operations, a U.S. Marine Corps Corporal, battlefield commission to Second Lieutenant pending. A terrible thing, the last boy gone from the Boy’s Room, gone from life, and no more to come bearing the Tozier name.

The south to which 15-year-old Melissa (she now was just Melissa; a month before, she had favored Pat) returned was booming. Booming maybe, but it was a somewhat sadder place, a place of so many newly dead. In addition to the loss of Second Lieutenant (pending) Rafe Tozier, the passing of Old Strog (the oldest person Melissa had ever known) now further diminished the family. A year before, Strog had the last portion of his second leg cut off. He never fully recovered and certainly was not able to make the trip to the Corners where the Cities Service Whites-Only would welcome him. He now lay buried in pale red-earth alongside Rafe and a passel of Toziers, Wallaces, Preckwinkles, Leblancs and other older names and branches that braided the family back into the dark shadows before time had gathered them all together on this continent.

Cousin Barbary Ann was inconsolable over the old man’s passing and about her brother. That surprised Melissa. B.A. seemed never actually to
like
the boy as others had. She always made faces, spoke unwell of him while others smiled and said loving things. B.A. spoke unwell of Rafe even in her short infrequent letters to Chicago, always found space to make firm-footed complaint of her brother, complaint that continued to the day he left for boot camp.

In her even less-frequent replies, Melissa mentioned Rafe once, and that in benevolent observation of the news of his loss. She was shocked, of course. Maybe not shocked. Who is shocked over a single death in so vast a war? In a way, isn’t it expected, Death? Isn’t it magical, somehow, when someone
doesn’t
die? Still, she was surprised. To her credit, Melissa was touched by it. And, of course, she lamented the waste.
So good-looking a boy being, well, wasted like that.
She remembered his hair in the sun, the gold of him, his smile, the scent of…

In further truth, however, Melissa could not say Rafe’s passing grieved her. Of course she had not the experience of the boy, day by day, an entire life-long. All she knew was the nasty summer boy who lived below the big house in the relative cool of the Boy’s Room and, once, had locked her in that damn smelly outhouse that one awful hot day. Then ignored her.

There had been no summer visit for years. Thus, the cousins hugged tight when hugging was going around at the train station. Barbary Ann, who still liked that name, or, sometimes, just B.A., Barbary Ann had grown pretty and soft. Her face was matured by grief, Melissa thought.

But, damn, if her tears weren’t fresh. And Rafe Tozier, months in the grave. But when Melissa thought the long close hug was over, B.A. clenched her again.

“Buried a suit is what we did, cousin,” she confided to Melissa. B.A. expanded upon that as they settled into the same room at the top of the house. The house seemed smaller and bigger at once, the paint peeled more like scabs than ever. “Oh, cousin, we buried a uniform of clothes. And not even his, just Marine Corps dress with the medals he was owed and the officer bars that came awarded after he was gone.” She spoke with an edge of sweetness and horror, a question hanging in her voice.

“Why?” Melissa barely said.

“Nothing left for burial, the gov’ment said. Can you imagine?”

“Imagine,” Melissa said. She looked at the floor as she shook her head. She did not want B.A. to see how dry her cheeks were. Dry not so much about Rafe, but over B.A.
That cousin of mine
, she hated to admit,
is just a silly, pretty thing! Girl’ll never amount to anything.

“Imagine? Nothing left of a whole human being,” B.A. sniffled. Then and there, looking at her cousin’s wet pretty face, Melissa remembered the night the two of them had spelled Rafe with that old ground-up spider.

“Remember,” Melissa began. And she remembered that silly night.

“Sometimes, you know, M’lissa, sometimes the best times we’ve got are the back end of the worst, darlin’!” Melissa couldn’t quite grasp that thought, but agreed to be nice. “So we all wish for a happy, happy end, some happy day.” With that, B.A. assembled a brave and miserably happy face.

The visit’s second day was hotter. Bright heat hugged Melissa, every breath felt drawn through a steamed towel. “You’re young women now,” Aunt Wallace said. “Yes, and old enough to go shopping to town by yourselves.” With silent gravity, the War Board ration point-book was entrusted to niece Melissa from Illinois (“‘Land of Lincoln,’ indeed!”) and the girls were sent walking to Monocle.

The heat rose in snaky waves from Mr. Roosevelt’s half-mile of Kingfish-inspired asphalt. Monocle was not so far as it was. The town had spread up that straightened WPA road and now covered over most of the old canal. Passing through the wartime bustle, the girls shopped for yard goods and notions, for canned and fresh and the weekly meat ration from Talifierro’s. Mr. Talifierro pointed with his long shiny chin as he weighed out their ration of bacon on the big white scale. “Look a’that nigger’s stroll, won’tcha?”

The cousins turned to look. Crossing the busy main street, a small colored boy walked. He was deliberate, slow, looking no way but ahead, not frightened, paying heed neither to the uncertain clomp of horses and wagons or to the huge military vehicles as they cleared their big-geared diesel throats, downshifting. Sweating uniformed drivers swerved and cursed in rippling midday.

“Niggras don’t care ’bout death, hisseff,” Mr. Talifierro said. “
That
’n at least! You’d think he was a haunt or something, ’stead of just a spook. Haw-haw.”

A man or two picked up Mr. Talifierro’s muley
haw-haws
. A pair of small white boys leaned noses against the shop window. Some ladies shook their heads, fearful for the boy.

Melissa bit the knuckles of her right hand until he reached the pavement and turned the corner.
Stupid
, she thought.
Stupid, stupid boy
. On the way home, their purchases dangling in a cotton web-bag hung between them, Barbary Ann grumbled. “Now I want you to know, Mr. Talifierro, there, was pure mush-mouthed ignorant,” she said, “calling that Negro boy a ‘nigger.’ Even, ‘niggra,’” she said. “Why, nobody—nobody—calls them that anymore, the coloreds. They are colored people, for goodness sake. Negroes.”

The tale was brought out at table that evening. B.A. quoted butcher Talifierro on the subject of “spooks.”

With the word “spook” raised twice in one day, the notion of “haints,” of ghosts, “spirits of air and waters” came to Melissa. Around her, in the silence between the still-sad adults at table, through the dark house and outside in twilight, there drifted the enduring dead.
A suit of clothes, indeed
, she thought. So thinking, Melissa remembered the night she and B.A. caught, killed, and ground that old wolf spider, fed it to cousin Rafe to vengeance his spirit for having locked her in the outhouse dark. They’d done it right there, right where they sat. Melissa laughed into the hungry circle.

“Why, what is tickling you, M’lissa Trish?” Aunt Wallace asked in the expectant silence. “Something amuse you?”

“Just something,” Melissa said. “A little nothing long ago.”

Everyone smiled and waited.

“No, that’s all. Just a silly thing, something of no matter. Pay me no mind.”

They stared until more important concerns arose. Of course she could not speak of cousin Rafe, his spirit caught and taken by the dust of a wolf spider. She couldn’t wrap a story of one so recently dead into a memory of silly girls shrieking in the night long ago. Of course the story was more about how the spider had nearly leaped on her and crawled over her hand in the outhouse and, all squished, had yet tried to run at her up the marble side of Aunt Wallace’s mortar bowl. Even so, no, she could not speak of curses and the beloved dead in one breath.

Melissa smiled again when she noticed the knothole above the stove, where wall and ceiling met. She wondered if a small, hairy spider leg would show.

It did not.

Sweltering in bed next to cousin B.A., Melissa asked why, in all this heat, why had she not moved down to the Boy’s Room.

“Silly thing. It is the
Boy’s
Room.”

“But it’s private…”

“No buts, Missy Melissa!”

“But,” she said, leaning on the word, “there are no boys.” Darn but she hated saying that. “And, I bet it is cooler and lots more comfortable.”

From the dark, B.A.’s voice was straight, stiff. “Th’ idea. Rafe so soon in his grave.”

“And with the Marines and boot camp, gone more than two years—two years gone in all, cuz.”

“Th’ idea!”

“And I am sure he wouldn’t mind us sleeping in that old shack. No disrespect, B.A., but under this hot roof there is no breath of air. For me, it is sleep in the Boy’s Room or on the porch by the ‘facility.’”

Thus, Melissa slept her first night in the Boy’s Room. They carried bedding and pillows. In a few steps, their feet were wet with dew. As before, the earth seemed cool, steeped in shadows that soaked into it from the woods. Melissa tingled but boldly trod, leading with the light from the same old night-crawler lamp.

B.A. hung back, unsure of the propriety of the enterprise. “Th’ idea. I cannot imagine what Mother and Father will want us to say, Rafe so soon in his grave.”

Rafe’s MEDALS so soon
, Melissa thought.
Some suit of Marine clothes so soon
. She did not say that, of course. “We’ll think of something appropriate after a good night’s sleep, Barbary,” is what she said.

The Boy’s Room smelled old. A hint of something else hung there, but did not smell too bad, not exactly, not after they threw the place open to night air. There was a little of dry leather to the scent, much of dust and moldy paper. The lantern revealed piles and piles of mildewed magazines, newspapers, funny books, illustrated periodicals of sports and crimes. Maybe there was something of dead animal to the air, too, but in a few minutes, even that had pretty well cleared. It was cooler.

The old shack leaned like a dog straining its lead; it drooped away from its wattle and daub chimneystack. Even so, the place seemed to have remained tight against weather and the windows didn’t stick too badly to their skewed frames. A push and a shove and they swung open. When they did, air flowed through from woods and field.

“Oh Barbary, feel the night breathe!” Melissa said.

“Yug,” B.A. said. She pointed the lamp at a stack of magazines at her feet. In the sudden light, silverfish swarmed like short bright words deserting the paragraphs of THE POLICE GAZETTE. “This was NOT a good idea, cuz.”

“Objection noted,” Melissa said, quoting a war film she had seen in Chicago. She put her back to the night. “But feel the air!”

Cautious as to the placement of her feet, B.A. stepped away from the piles. Closer to the window, she sniffed and hugged herself through a shiver. The lantern flickered. Outside, wind-sifted moss swept a quiet whisper through the grass. Dry catalpa pods clacked. Something, some furred critter most likely, cracked a branch along the edge of the trees. Another something ruffled one of the piles of paper in a farther corner of the room.

“Boo!” Melissa said loudly, jumping at her cousin. B.A. shrieked a quick yelp. As did Melissa, who had frightened herself.

Then the cousins laughed, made up the old spring bed by the quickly failing lantern, lay down together and soon, sooner than they realized they might, they slept.

Then on, the visit was pleasant, considering the sadness of its occasion. By permission unasked, word ungiven, the girls continued sleeping in the Boy’s Room.

The visit was a short one. Melissa’s daddy had to return to Chicago in a few days, return to work, his work of the war. Mother, too, had duties: volunteer war efforts, other duties, duties, if not of family, then of life, life back north in Chicago. “‘Land of Lincoln,’ indeed!” Barbary Ann said of her cousin’s home, and no more was said about it.