Four Spirits (46 page)

“I MARRIED ME A MAN, AND I DIDN'T MARRY NO NIGGER,”
Agnes said to TJ, and she felt joy, like a hearth fire in winter, springing to life in her bosom.

Then she held out her hand and said for him to come on into the bedroom with her.

“Let's shuck out of these hot clothes,” she said, but really she didn't mind the heat of the summer anymore.

“I believe you want to tango?” he said. “I believe you ready to
dance.”

TJ was already in his bare feet. He unfastened his trousers and stepped out of them.

“You wearing your young-man undershorts,” she said. Her husband was no taller than she, but she loved the well-molded brown legs against the white Jockey shorts. She started unbuttoning the front of her dress, when she heard a knock at the door. Her hand stopped. She looked at TJ. “Let's just not answer,” she said.

TJ picked his trousers up off the floor and stepped in one leg. “It won't take but a minute,” he said.

“I'm afraid,” she said. “Let's not.”

TJ said, “All right.” And he picked up the blond baseball bat standing in the corner. “I'll take the Louisville Slugger with me.”

While he walked out of the room, Agnes buttoned up her shirtwaist dress as fast as she could. She stepped back into her pumps. When TJ opened the door a crack, four white men burst in.

Agnes charged into the room. “I done call the police,” she shouted. “I done call them.”

TJ had retreated to the corner. He had the bat cocked like he was about to hit a home run. “Y'all leave us alone now,” he said.

But one of the men reached for the living room light switch and turned it off. She saw the rush of their dark bodies, heard the thud of the bat. “Aim for they head!” she shouted, and she took off each of her shoes. She attacked the mass of men, and a big hand pushed hard into her stomach. She staggered back but ran at the blob of them again and hammered at them with the heels of her pumps, one in each hand, till she heard the thud of a body hit the floor, and somebody white say
he's down
.

They turned the lights back on, and Agnes saw her husband with blood on his head, lying on his side on the floor.
Tom,
she crooned. He was little, like a little brown baby dressed like a man.
Tom!
She watched TJ draw his knees up, and two men kicked him around the hips and pelvis. TJ covered his head with his arms. One of the men was holding the bat by the big end, and he began to strike around TJ's head with the little end. Another man pushed his buddy aside and got out his own blackjack wrapped in leather.

Agnes sank to her knees and lifted her empty hands. “I pray, gentlemen, don't strike him no more. He's a good man. He never done nothing. Not to nobody.”

“Who's with you,” the blackjack man wanted to know. “Name names.”

TJ groaned.

“You hear me!” And the blackjack cracked against his cheek, and blood spattered. TJ covered the place with his hand, and they beat the back of his hand, and the skin was gone.

“Lord help us; Lord help us,” Agnes prayed, on her knees, pressing her hands together.

“Shut up,” one of the men said and pushed her over.

“Jesus, save my Tom,” Agnes prayed as she lay on the floor, but they continued to beat him.

“Speak up, speak up. We ain't got all night,” one said to TJ.

“He can't talk,” Agnes yelled. “He's unconscious. Oh, Lord, let him live. Let him live.”

One man lunged against the wall and turned off the light again.

She heard the kicks and the blows, and she struggled to her knees. She
heard a high keening, which was her own voice. She squeezed her eyes shut and entered the darkness where only God could dwell. Then her throat opened in hymn pitched heaven high, sung in her nightmare voice, “ ‘Father, I stretch my hand to thee,' ” and she stretched out her hand into the blackness. “ ‘No other help I know,' ” she sang through her sobs. “ ‘If thou withdraw thy help from me, where shall I go?' ”

And suddenly, they stopped. She could hear them stopping, one by one. Just their hoarse breath. God was among them, staying their hand.

“Dead or alive?” one asked.

“Who has the power?” one of them asked, and she knew the question was for her.

“You do,” she said. “You and the Lord.”

“You speak for your husband?”

“I do.”

Like the scream of the Holy Spirit, the sound of a siren tore the night. The four men ran for the back of the house. Police were running up the steps and flinging open the door. Beams from two big flashlights cut the darkness of the room as Agnes crawled toward TJ.

A white male voice filled the room: “We got a report a black man was raping a white woman in here.” Their lights searched the floor, stopped on TJ's broken body.

“No, sir,” Agnes said. “Four white mens done beat my husband.” On hands and knees, she crawled toward him. She would shield him. They'd have to beat through her.

Somebody turned on the overhead light. The two policemen were holding drawn guns in one hand and the big flashlights in the other.

“Lord God,” one of the men swore. He had seen TJ.

Suddenly Maggie from next door was pushing in. “Get some ice,” she told Agnes. She felt TJ's skull and touched the wounds on his face. “I brought my first-aid kit,” Maggie said, and she placed the little blue box in her lap and unsnapped the lid. Her gray hair was subdued into many horizontal sausage curls that covered her head.

The younger of the officers respectfully asked Agnes, “You gonna press any charges, ma'am?”

The other officer put his gun back in the holster. “Let's go,” he said.

Agnes said, “We don't know who they were. They all looked alike.”

“You who called?” the older officer impatiently asked Maggie.

“No, sir,” she said. “I didn't call, but I heard the screaming.”

Lord God,
even they had exclaimed. The young one.

“You can be fined for a false alarm,” the other officer went on in a cruel voice.

Agnes looked at them more closely. That one had straight gray hair; the other looked almost young as a boy, and he was little. Their badges flashed every time they moved their chests.

“You want me to call an ambulance?” the young one asked.

Maggie stood up. “We thank you kindly,” she said. “But I'm a practical nurse. I believe he'll be all right.”

Already Maggie was pressing a tea towel full of ice cubes against TJ's head. Agnes knew doors were opening across the street and throughout the neighborhood. People were watching and waiting. Outside, the police car light pulsed luridly.

“Jesus Christ, we don't have time for this,” the older officer said, and they were gone.

“Hold that ice against his head,” Maggie told Agnes.

“God was here,” Agnes said. “I was at the bottom of the blackest pit and I called on the Lord.”

“I called the police,” Maggie said. “Claimed a white woman was dragged in kicking and screaming by four bucks. Gave your address.”

Agnes scooted under TJ, held his precious head in her lap, and put the ice on his battered forehead.

The room was filling with neighbors.

“ ‘Open your eyes,' ” Agnes crooned to TJ. “ ‘Open your eyes to Jesus. He loves you.' ”

She watched TJ's eyelids flutter and open. But his face was a mask of pain. She tried to blot out the raw flesh image before her eyes with the memory of her husband, unhurt, holding the bat cocked over his shoulder, his face confident that he could hit a home run like Jackie Robinson.

 

THAT NIGHT, FAR BACK
in the closet, Agnes hung up her dress with the bloody lap. In front of the bloody dress, she hung an older dress, like a drape, so she wouldn't see the stains. Though she never looked at the ruined dress
again, many years later on the day of her death, her bed surrounded by three grown children she had raised to safety, Agnes knew the dress with TJ's blood still hung in the back of her closet. She felt again how it had been to insert the wire coat hanger into the shoulders of the dress, the act of hooking the hanger over the wooden pole.

 

WHEN MAGGIE BECKONED,
their friends carried TJ to the bed. Maggie smeared his wounds with yellow Unguentine from a squat, square canister. She sent for her blue houndstooth ice bag, told Agnes to screw off the lid, which resembled the cap on a car gas tank, and to fill the rubber-lined bag with more ice. All Agnes could do was notice little things; she was afraid to look at TJ. She admired how the fabric was neatly swirled and gathered like a pinwheel into the metal rim around the opening to the ice bag's stomach.

She heard herself whispering, “Is he crushed?”

She whispered the sentence louder and louder till Maggie heard her and answered matter-of-factly, “Naw. He be all right.”

The neighbor men left “to talk.” Two women said they would sit up in the living room, for Agnes to go on to bed. Maggie needed to go to the hospital for the night shift, but she instructed three of the men to sit on the porch.
Yes, ma'am,
they said, eyes lowered respectfully. Maggie was the power who saved a man—that was acknowledged; she was short and squat, but she had used the power of quick wit and practical-nurse knowledge.

Alone in the bedroom with TJ, Agnes turned out the light and got into her sleeveless summer nightgown. Though it was her familiar thin cotton, printed with small green stars, she found it alien. Trying not to jiggle the bed, Agnes lay on her back beside TJ. He wasn't unconscious, just asleep. He, too, lay on his back, and she took his hand, the good one. The other one was encased in white gauze, already stained yellow where the Unguentine had soaked out. She knew his head was wrapped, too, like an Egyptian mummy, but she couldn't bring herself to look toward his face.

She feared to sleep, to wake, to find him—not wounded—but with his spirit defeated.

She felt so nervous that fire seemed to travel her veins. Usually, they cuddled together when they slept, though her friends told her they themselves never slept cuddled; it made men too horny. She had said, “I always make my
man welcome.” Many a night, he was gone to work. Every night he was home, after he'd gotten a bit of rest and sleep, he came to her. Sometimes twice or even three times in the night. Always, he was welcome and always she prayed after his pleasure that she might conceive, but she never did.

It was strange to sleep so straight—her lying there trembling—instead of cuddled with interlaced arms and legs. She felt that they were laid out like the dead, only she had the jerks. She could still hear the thud of the blackjack against TJ's head and shoulders.
He be mighty sore for a week,
Maggie had said.
But he ain't broke. He got a good hard head.

Agnes heard again the moment when her lie “I done called the police already” became true, when the Holy Ghost screamed through the siren of the police, and the four brutal white men ran away. Now her hands were shaking like leaves on a cottonwood tree. She tried to picture the night riders individually, but she could not. One wore a white robe, belted at the waist by a stout white twisty rope; his hood was off, and his neck and head had looked naked. He had the blackjack. One had on a blue denim work shirt, with red thread writing on the pocket. But she had been too terrified to read, and she couldn't envision it clearly—just red writing on a blue shirt.

Now she remembered the one with the rope belt had had his hood on, when he came in. That he was the first through the door. And then he had pulled his hood off, and she had known even then that he removed it so he could see better to attack TJ. When the four men ran toward the back door, that one had held his hood by its point, and it had streamed behind him like an empty ghost head.

Agnes closed her eyes so she could be in the darkness with God again.

She began to move her lips, thanking God who could read soundless lips and hear her song even from beyond the stars.
Wonderful, Counselor, Almighty God, Lord is my Shepherd, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, Blessed are the meek, Jesus, I thank you for hearing my prayer….

She fell asleep praying and would awake with a prayer on her lips, but in the night, TJ opened an eye and spoke to her—“I love you, Agnes,” he said—and she heard him, and heard the old surety in his voice. He still knew who he was.

An idea just cleft her mind like striking lightning: tomorrow night she would go back to her night school. She must. She wouldn't back down any more than TJ would.

She thought of the two women in the living room, one probably asleep on
the sofa, the other probably dozing in the matching easy chair, two angels, old friends who were guarding her house for all their nodding off. The men on the front porch were like cherubim and seraphim.

…Sweet Jesus, Blessed Savior, with all my heart, I thank Thee.

 

IN THE MORNING,
she finished her prayer, lying beside TJ, thanking God and muttering
Glory to God, Most High.
Then she got up, telephoned the Bankhead Hotel, and asked to speak to Mr. McCormick.

“Mr. McCormick,” she said, “this is TJ's wife, Mrs. Agnes LaFayt, and last night four Klan men near 'bout beat TJ to death, so he not coming into work for a week. Then he be back to work, that all right with you.”

She listened to his silence. Because she knew the man's mind, though she had never seen him, soon she would hear his inevitable reply. Like fingers in a sock puppet head, God would move his lips, start up his voice box.

Not the content but the tone of the man's voice surprised her: he felt shame. “Two weeks,” he said. “With pay. Thank you for calling.”

“Thank you,” she said, and then she hung up the phone.

She saw TJ looking at her with his one good eye, the other covered with gauze.