Freshwater Road (40 page)

Celeste squatted on her haunches beside the spigot as the sun slinked on
towards the horizon and the cloudless sky went blue-gray with streaks of orange. String-tied bunches of collards wrapped in newspapers had appeared
on the steps of the house last evening and this morning. The water sprinkled
and splashed and cooled her legs as she washed each broad-faced leaf front
and back. Under the running water, her sun-dark hands shriveled. Her
forearms cramped from the repeated motion, and she felt spasmodic aches
in her back and thighs from the bending and squatting. Still, the work relieved her, numbed her longing for Ed and her suspicions about what really
happened to Sissy. She'd rechecked her map. Cataboula Creek appeared
then disappeared south of Pineyville, not far, but far for a child. Sissy was a
runner; she could've made it there, but Celeste still didn't understand why
she'd even start out running south. She tried to read where the creek flowed
from, what river it emptied into. But the map wasn't clear.

When she'd filled the tub with cleaned collards, she carried it around
to the back of the house where Mrs. Owens hacked off the coarse stems
and rechecked each leaf for bugs and sand. Salt pork and hocks boiled in
frothy water, smelling like Momma Bessie's Easter Sunday dinner, then
the sweetness of the onions, and finally the greens, the mixing of the three
turning into something that made you irrationally hungry, made you want
to sit down and devour a plate full of greens with a little vinegar and sliced
tomatoes and nothing else.

Celeste sat with a glass of iced tea and untied her red farmer's hand kerchief from her hair, folded it into a square, and used it to wipe her
sweat-drenched face. She'd been washing greens all afternoon. She held the
cold glass to her forehead, then her neck. Food was the balm of mourning.
In Detroit, it was food and drink. Death brought the whiskey bottles out
of their handsome cabinets. A mourner might end up drunk in a kitchen
chair, stuffed with food, narcotized against the pain of releasing a loved one.
The eating, drinking, philosophizing, and reminiscing went on for hours,
even days. By the day of the funeral, you were ready to put the deceased in
the ground just so you could rest.

Mrs. Owens drained most of the water off a large pot of cooled greens,
then divided them into bowls that she covered with wax paper and set in the
refrigerator. The last cooking pot steamed up the kitchen, sending vapors
out through the back door and the opened windows. She poured herself a
glass of tea and then sat down with Celeste, the two of them sweat-soaked
and weary. They cooked for Sissy's repast after her funeral tomorrow.

"You oughta open a restaurant in town." Celeste smiled through her
fatigue, felt like she'd been out picking cotton. "White people'd pay for
those greens you cook."

Mrs. Owens's dress front and apron were splotched with greens juice
and water. Her swollen knuckles clutched her iced tea glass, her fingers
beginning to arch out in the wrong directions. "I couldn't do this every
day, girl. Besides, they been getting 'em for free for years. If not mine, then
somebody else's."

Celeste leaned back in her chair, already calling Shuck in her mind,
already asking him to stake the Negro people of Pineyville by helping them
open their own restaurant. The closest Negro restaurant was in Hattiesburg.
Calling Shuck. Only now did she think of what that would mean in light of
Wilamena's letter. She always called Shuck. Before college, she called him at
the club when she got home from school, from dates, from other relatives'
houses. Calling Shuck. Now it was changed. Should she tell him? Ask him?
How to form the sentences in her mouth that might separate them in some
unseen way, some subtle letting go of all that had been? Would he still hold
on to her if Wilamena was telling the truth? If Wilamena didn't really know,
what would he want to do? Cast her out into the anonymous world, the
world of miscellaneous unattached people who drifted?

"You all right, child?" Mrs. Owens's hand was on Celeste's arm.

Celeste blinked away the tears that pooled in her eyes. She had to keep herself there at the table with Mrs. Owens, but she wanted to run out the
door and down Freshwater Road to cry in solitude. "Yes, ma'am." They had
been talking about starting a restaurant in Pineyville, she remembered.
"We'll call it Madame Stone's Tea Room and serve whiskey in china teacups, collard greens, red beans with pickled pork and cornbread, shrimp
and okra over rice on china plates." Celeste saw the two of them slaving over
the collards then serving them on pretty plates. Lace cloths like Momma
Bessie used. Teapots of whiskey, homemade in the backwoods and storebought in New Orleans, poured into delicate cups. No more dry Pearl
River County.

"Sounds nice enough. But we be under that jail soon as the sheriff finds
out what's in those tea cups. And he will find out. Believe you me." Her eyes
sparkled in her grooved brown face. "I don't take to drinking."

Celeste strained to keep up her end of the conversation, had lost interest
in the idea. "Who knows? He might like it."

"Soon as we start taking in the money, some jealous no-'count come
along and burn it down." Mrs. Owens sounded deep and sorrowful. "I
know what they did over in Florida, and I heard what they did out in
Oklahoma. People always leaving here and writing back, moving about
trying to find some place better. Words travel."

"You mean like that riot in Detroit a long time ago?"

The kitchen grew silent but for the last steaming pot, the humming
refrigerator pulling power from the lines in the back, the soft ting of ice
cubes on glass. They could've been the early crowd at the Royal Gardens.
Work-hard women who stopped by for a gin and tonic and an easy laugh
on their way home.

"And more." Mrs. Owens turned toward the back door like a deer in the
woods. Red hats and white sheets coming. Celeste followed her look, pushing
away from the table and ready to drop to the floor.

"You lock that door?" The words stumbled on each other, her body
frozen in the chair.

Celeste tried to see into the gray early night outside the door, trying to
read the other woman's thoughts. "Yes, ma'am." The sandy earth obscured
sound like baffling in a theatre. She waited for Mrs. Owens to move knowing she'd follow her, either to the floor, the front of the house, or to grab
a cast-iron skillet to use as a weapon. Not a thought of nonviolence. Then
came a faint knocking on the back wall of the house.

"Who's there?" Mrs. Owens went to the door, standing to the side.

Mrs. Tucker came up the steps so that the light of the kitchen revealed
her face. "Ain't nobody but me."

Mrs. Owens unlatched the screen and held the door open.

Mrs. Tucker's dress belt hung from one loop and the weight of the
open buttons pulled the bodice away from her chest so that the top of her
slip showed. She wore no shoes. Her hair stuck out in tufts on one side
and lay flat on the other. In the light, Celeste could see what looked like a
straightening comb burn blistering on her retreating cheek.

Mrs. Owens sat her down, brought ice from a tray, and held it to the
woman's face. "Celeste, pour Zenia some tea."

"You supposed to use butter." The words caught in her throat.

Mrs. Owens continued her first aid. "Not'less you want to cook it some
more.

Celeste put the glass on the table, thinking of Sissy the first time she
came running through that back door from among the pines.

Mrs. Owens studied Zenia Tucker. "You scared us to death."

Zenia drank. "Didn't mean to." Her hands shook. Mrs. Owens helped
her get the glass to her mouth and back to the table without spilling all the
tea in her lap. "I can't stay long." She kept her eyes down. "They went over to
Hattiesburg to get Sissy. Him and the Reverend. Take her to the church..."
She broke off. Sissy's casket would be small enough to fit in the back seat of
the big Hudson. "I can smell them greens all the way down the road. Smell
good." Mrs. Tucker's hands rested.

Maybe the aroma of the greens spread through the air all the way into
town. A hundred white people drawn to their windows trying to place
where the aroma came from, then leaving their houses to follow the scent
like hungry ghosts in the night, walking along the two-lane in single file,
bringing their glistening faces all the way to Freshwater Road to eat Geneva
Owens's greens. Coming to the home they left a long time ago, hands out,
hearts out, needy for the love in that pot of greens.

Zenia Tucker sighed so deeply it seemed her heart would have to stop
beating. When she inhaled, the words rode out. "If I had a gun, I'd put it
to my own head." She dropped her eyes again, searching her lap, her dress,
her hands that wrung, one over the other, as if they throbbed with some
unrelenting arthritic pain.

Mrs. Owens turned the fire off under the greens. "Well, then, I'm glad you don't have one." She released the lid to rush the cooling. "You've got
them boys to raise." From her place at the stove, Mrs. Owens gestured to
Celeste to leave the two older women alone.

She excused herself knowing full well she was going to lurk and listen.
She crouched on the linoleum floor just behind her curtain door.

Mrs. Tucker's broken voice came in fits and starts through the short hall.
"He saying he think them white boys took his car that time killed Sissy. To
get back at him for having the car in the first place."

"I've seen them driving real slow by the gas station." Mrs. Owens's voice
flattened. "Tryin' to scare somebody. I wouldn't put it past 'em."

If Celeste moved, even breathed too deeply, Mrs. Owens, who knew
every sound the little house made at every hour of the day and night, would
know she was listening. She leaned her head against the doorless doorframe, feeling the cool linoleum. Ice cubes clinked as their glasses came
down on the table after each sip.

"Sure nice your boys give you that refrigerator, Geneva."

It was too big and too modern for the kitchen, but Celeste wondered
if she could've made it through the summer without its ice trays and cool
little blasts every time she opened it.

"Don't know what I'd do without it." Mrs. Owens stopped. The silence
between the two women pounded like muffled drums. A tapping, perhaps
a spoon on the tabletop.

Celeste crawled halfway out of her room into the hallway, holding her
breath, afraid to lean now for fear the wall would creak. Mrs. Owens only
had to peek around a corner to see her sitting there huddled on the floor.
The parlor was dark and quiet. She sat there losing the two women for a
moment, feeling like crawling into the room where Ed had slept, pressing
her body into the floor to find some scent of him.

Zenia's voice relaxed to a smoother flow. "They still sending you
something?

"Don't know what I'd do without that either. My hands don't let me do
washing and cleaning the way I used to." Celeste imagined Mrs. Owens
holding her hands up so that Mrs. Tucker could see the way the fingers were
beginning to angle to the right and left. "Course you know that child give
me some money for the summer, too. That's been a help."

Celeste liked the way she referred to her as "that child." She was nearly
twenty, but it made her feel like some woman's daughter.

"Oh, I didn't know that. Wished my boys was grown and gone from
here." Heavy rocks weighted her words. "Maybe I go with them." She
sniffled. Celeste imagined her sitting there with her hair, part fresh-washed
kinky and part straightened, tears coming down her face, salt stinging the
burn on her cheek. Wanted to strain a little farther into the hall so she could
see them-but if she could see them, they could see her. She sat still.

"You might not like it. I didn't. Course you younger than me." Mrs.
Owens's tone soothed the air as if she were talking to a troubled child who
promised to do better the next time.

"If they go, I'm not staying with him." Mrs. Tucker's voice cut like a
newly sharpened carving knife when she said "him." "Shoulda taken Sissy
and left a long time ago."

"He's a good provider." Mrs. Owens spoke but it was like a crash, like a
crane falling from a mountain-high building. She spoke of Mr. Tucker so
differently now. This was the man in whose eyes she'd seen the devil. Why
was she being so kind? Celeste nearly gave herself away, wanted to stand
from her hiding place and scream. Remember the devil in his eyes? Is the
devil a "good provider?" She had to remain still.

"Sometimes I think he did it. Chased her to death. I don't know what
he was doing with her. He ain't right." Ice cubes clinking, glasses thudding
on the table.

Zenia, for the first time, sounded like she had some sense. Celeste felt
nothing but confusion.

Silence. Celeste was trapped, couldn't move back into her room or
run out the front door into Freshwater Road screaming. She never had
gone to see Mrs. Tucker about Sissy. It might have given the woman an
opportunity to tell something. It might have given Celeste a chance to
say something, too.