Freshwater Road (38 page)

Ed got out first. "Who?"

"Sissy ain't home yet." Mrs. Owens held herself upright like she'd been
starched.

Celeste climbed out of the car slowly. In Detroit, children played outside until night during summer. Up and down the sidewalks on roller
skates, tearing around on bicycles, playing hide-and-go-seek in the purplefruited mulberry bushes. "It's not even dark yet." The implacable heat
pounded her.

Mrs. Owens stepped back on the dirt path as if shocked the child was not
with them, then remembered her manners: "How you doing, Mr. Jolivette?"

Ed held out his hands to Mrs. Owens, engulfing hers, calming her. She
wiped her eyes with a corner of her apron. "I was praying y'all picked her up
on the road. You know she just worship Celeste." The words "picked her up
on the road" sank into Celeste. Highs and lows and dog barks and cicadas,
a distant songbird on the wing trying to find home before night. She stood
still to hear the quiet melody of sounds rising above the front of the house,
merging now, not clear enough to distinguish. Sissy ain't home yet.

Celeste ran into the house to her room. On the dresser, Shuck and
Billy caught in a calm, ease on their faces, in their sloping arms, Shuck
smiling with his eyes, head cocked to the side. Her eyes cut away from the
patched-up photo of Wilamena and Cyril Atwood. Poor Mr. Atwood. In
the cracked mirror, her face already showed the distortion of another bad
dream moving forward, devouring every good thing in its way. Had Sissy
come to the back door looking for her? She'd been off in New Orleans
having a good time. She'd first left early in the morning to ride to Meridian
with Reverend and Etta Singleton, then left Meridian with Ed for the trip
to New Orleans the next morning. For almost two full days she'd been
unavailable. Sissy, I left to mourn and then to rest for just a minute, and now
you're gone. Don't do this, not today. Get back here.

Royal blue night coming, cut-out sky with stars that seemed to touch
and flicker, like the sky painted into the ceiling of a movie theater in Detroit, she and Billy sitting there staring at the big screen. The fake night of
the theater ceiling encouraged illusion. Mississippi was like that: seemed
too real to be true, like a dream world, a movie world, yet alive behind a
curtain of wet air and monster blossoms, magnolias the size of a child's
head. She came back outside.

"How long she been gone?" Ed's contained, sure voice was a balm on
the evening air.

"Mrs. Tucker say she ain't been home since early morning." Mrs. Owens
pointed to the Tucker house, her voice laying easier now. "Ain't like her."

Celeste didn't move near Mrs. Owens. Guilt curled through her. She
wanted to call out that Sissy had been coming to the kitchen to get her
freedom school lessons against her father's orders, that Sissy came to the
church and hung out by the door. Mrs. Owens knew that already, but no
one dared say it to Mr. Tucker. It was their secret. Even Reverend Singleton
didn't know. If Mr. Tucker saw Sissy running from the back of the house
or running from the church door, he'd punish her. He'd made that clear
enough.

"Mr. Tucker and Reverend Singleton out trying to find her. Y'all might
as well come on in here cause they know everywhere to look and y'all
don't." Mrs. Owens let the screen door thud behind her. It should have
been a cracking slam, a sound to break the doomful anxiety into which
they treaded.

"She just ran away from home is all." Firecrackers went off in Celeste's head. "Mr. Tucker keeps her on a short rope." She stopped herself from
feeding her own frenzy. Thoughts thick as bulrushes at the edge of the
Nile. Child gone. Need some luck here, Shuck. Need a good dream and a
better number. Will you still bet on me, Shuck? "She always stays back by the
door looking out for Mr. Tucker the whole time. She loves stories about
slaves escaping. Frederick Douglass is her absolute favorite." She waited for
a judgment from Ed Jolivette.

Mosquitoes plunged into their skins, making them slap their arms and
legs, leaving little spots of blood and black stems. Had Sissy signaled that
she was about to flee?

"There you go." Ed didn't say anything else. Did he mean the story of
Frederick Douglass inspired a child to flee?

"What're you saying?" Celeste fed the child's wanderlust at every opportunity and now she thought it was too much.

"You came to Mississippi because of stories you heard," Ed said. "A child
could dream of leaving for the same reason."

"Dreaming and doing it are two different things." Celeste stared down
the road toward the Tucker house. "Shouldn't we check on Mrs. Tucker?"
She scratched the new mosquito bites, rubbing the flaking suntanned skin
on her arms and ankles.

"Best to wait here like Mrs. Owens said. If Mr. Tucker and Reverend
Singleton don't find her, they'll go to the police." Ed slumped across the
shoulders as he spoke. "I'm going to sit with y'all for a while, but I got to
get back on the road." The chirping wail of crickets started in, like soldiers
singing in time to their steps.

"Why don't we go to the police now? If Sissy ran away because of the
story, she'll be waiting for night somewhere, then searching for the North
Star and trying to follow it."

"They're not our police." Ed sounded like Shuck, one foot in the mainstream and the other running. God bless the child, Shuck always said. Who
would bless Sissy? Not ourpolice? "Don't we have any police?" She mumbled
it. Negroes barely had police in Detroit. The old people used to talk about
it. If they stumbled onto a suspect or a solution, fine. If someone ratted,
informed, they'd proceed. If Negroes didn't have police up there, they sure
as hell didn't have any in Mississippi.

"She's a kid. Klan wouldn't want her." But as far as Sissy was concerned,
the Klan wasn't the only danger. "If Mr. Tucker saw Sissy anywhere near the freedom school, he might be as bad as the Klan or worse." She put it out
there hoping he'd pick it up.

Ed sat down on the porch steps with his legs apart, his elbows resting on
his knees. "They don't care how old she is." His tight dark skin creased as if
cut by a knife when he spoke. She saw the muscles in his jaws working.

"Doesn't have to be anything like that." Would he even entertain the
thought that wherever Sissy was, it might not have anything to do with
white people?

"What else would it be?" He took her in with the slightest break in his
way of speaking. Something behind the words. He can't let it in. The possibility that Negro people destroyed each other too, even in the face of all
the good that was going on. Not now, not during Freedom Summer.

"Negro people are no different from anybody else." She knew it wasn't
true, sensed he could launch into epics that revealed how different Negroes
were, starting with skin and hair, starting with slavery. Stand-outs, the
differences shouted across the sunny landscape, dark skin stealing the light,
always in high relief. Shadow people. Melody in the movements. Sorrows in
the songs. Slavery changed everything forever. "Mr. Tucker's a dangerous
man. Mrs. Owens said she saw the devil in his eyes one time. Like I said, he
was real mean about Sissy coming to the freedom school." Celeste walked
a few paces on the dry dirt path.

"Somebody's always disappearing in Mississippi." Ed seemed to be disappearing, too. He sounded like he didn't have anything left for this child.

He stood up and she leaned into him. Wasn't it enough that three young
men had died? What else needed to happen for this to stop? She felt herself
slipping down his body.

"You can't break now." There was still a sliver of light far off toward
the west, pulling darkness across the world. She backed away from him
for fear someone would see them showing affection in the open air. It was
against movement rules to show affection, to fraternize romantically in
the open.

"I hope it wasn't that Frederick Douglass story that sent Sissy running."
But that's what she felt it was, that and her overbearing father. One way or
another, it was the story that sang to Sissy, lulling her to believe that she
too could be free by following a star. The freedom sirens opened their arms
then pointed their fingers in the direction of her dreams. Messages coming
from unseen places.

What felt like the last breath of life sighed out of her. "She must've come
looking for me, and I was off in New Orleans having a good time."

"Don't do that." Ed reached for her but didn't pull her in close again.

"She's afraid of her father. Every time she stood in that church door, she
knew she was challenging him. I should have been here." Celeste pleaded
with him, with herself, with life.

"What were you going to do? Stop her father from being her father?"
Ed shook his head.

She inhaled those words. Shuck pushed his fistgently into her lower spine.
Stand up straight before Iput a board in your back. It was always God bless
the child, even when it came to something as unknowable as this, even
when it came to having the strength to go one more step when you felt
the bones in your knees turning to chips. Sissy might've run the long way
around and ended up in the trees behind Mrs. Owens's house, waiting for
a sign. If the Hudson had turned onto Freshwater Road, she would've taken
off through the pines.

Celeste walked into the house, Ed behind her. Mrs. Owens sat in a
pyramid of light in the stifling kitchen, stricken and worn-out, with the
bible on the table. Take it to the Lord. The back door was open as if some
reprieve from the heat would walk up the weather-gray slat board steps,
come inside, and sit awhile. Or Sissy, breaking into a run from the line of
pines like a dart across the night, a shooting star, calling out, I don't want
to go home. Celeste knew why she didn't want to go home. She knew why
Sissy stayed by the church door, then disappeared, running around the
neighborhood hurling herself at people, talking, lingering, laughing, letting everyone know she was any place but at the freedom school. Her alibi.
Neighbors told Mrs. Tucker that Sissy stopped by. Mr. Tucker heard it. As
long as she was nowhere near that freedom school.

They sat there, the house creaking and settling like it might fall if one
more storm hit it. The bony dogs of Freshwater Road suddenly started howling and barking, kicking up dirt, sniffing for food, sending false alarms
down the spine as they chased some skinny rat or gopher under the crawl
space of another house just like this one.

But weren't they sitting in the kitchen too soon? Mourning begins here.
When Grandma Pauline died, they'd gathered in the kitchen to whisper ancient stories, harvest tears, and stare into death's blank face. Even Wilamena
had come to town for one day to bury her own mother. Long spaces of quiet as words failed. Sissy was only hiding from her father. We don't need to be
in this kitchen yet.

Waxed paper covered a plate on the stove. Celeste put the plate into
the buzzing refrigerator. Mrs. Owens poured iced tea for her and Ed, then
started slowly turning the pages of her bible. Darkness but for the single
lightbulb overhead. They were three poker players in a backroom joint betting on Sissy's return. Ed planted his hands on the table and leaned back
away from them in his chair. Steel in his eyes saying I'm notgetting on board
theJesus train. The service in Meridian had taken its toll.

"I love Thee, 0 Lord, my strength." Mrs. Owens read from Psalm i8.
"The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer."

Celeste found her lips moving along for a line or two, remembering
she'd heard it a million times from Momma Bessie, Grandma Pauline,
and every other Negro woman of a certain age she'd ever known. It was
when their men died or went wild murdering themselves, or fell into the
angry traps set for them every step of the way. They were there on Sunday
mornings, fanning and fainting, when life and men became more than they
could bear, when they needed the Lord as substitute man, as balm for life's
never-ending abrasions.

Geneva Owens closed her eyes. "Lord, Jesus, please spare this child."
She slid the bible to Celeste. "Now, Celeste, you read. Try the 29. That's one
we read together." Proud that here she was the teacher.

Celeste turned the thin, crinkling pages. Corners folded here and there.
Rainy tear spots, circles of salt eating at the black-ink words and the oily
secretions of desperate hands marking use, agreement, supplication. "Ascribe to the Lord, 0 sons of the mighty, ascribe to the Lord glory and
strength." The words moved around in her mouth like sand crabs walking sideways, seeking a tide pool. Shuck didn't give much credence to the
bible. Said it had a way of hamstringing life. Momma Bessie and Grandma
Pauline tussled with it, succumbed to it. She didn't have a clue as to where
Wilamena was with it. "The voice of the Lord is powerful, the voice of the
Lord is majestic." If not this bible, then what?

Celeste moved the bible towards Ed. Leaning back in his chair, respectful and disdainful at the same time. Arms folded across his chest. No.

Ed had lost faith. Was life in the south mean enough to wrench a person's
faith right from their soul? Celeste thought that it might be, and turned her
mind away from the bible on the table.

Thin streaks of night coolness laced the heavy air. Mrs. Owens turned
to the Book of Lamentations and read, "Remember my affliction and my
wandering, the wormwood and bitterness. Surely my soul remembers, and
is bowed down within me." She closed the book and rose from her chair,
breaking the spell of lethargy. In the dim cave of light, Celeste looked into
the darkness beyond the window.

Ed drove off into the night, heading for the Hattiesburg project where
he'd meet up with Matt. Celeste held her breath as he pulled away, had kept
quiet about asking him to stay and sleep again on Mrs. Owens's parlor floor.
He and Matt would monitor the Hattiesburg project then continue on to
Crystal Springs. She gnashed her teeth when she finally slept, a grinding
that she heard in her dreams. Behind her eyes, John Coltrane played a
celestial solo on a dark stage in a single circle of light. A white man stood in
the middle of the concert hall, raised a gun, and shot him dead. Ed leaped
from his seat beside her, his long legs climbing over seat backs, shoulders,
people screaming. He tackled the man, took the gun, and shot him. Ed said
"goodbye" with his eyes, ran toward an exit, and jumped into an ink-black
river. He was gone.