Home Another Way (23 page)
The village of Bethel seemed more downtrodden than Jonah, if that was possible. It didn’t have a main street, only several clusters of two-story houses, painted white and gray—and a putrid green that somehow always made an appearance in towns of this sort. Even with the map, I got lost. I couldn’t find a single street sign or an open business I could stop at to ask for directions. I knocked on a few doors, but no one answered; they peeked out from behind bed-sheet curtains, suspicious faces dropping from sight when I looked toward them.
All this trouble for a stupid pair of skates.
Finally, I spotted a soggy flap of cardboard box nailed to a corner telephone pole, the sign for the church with a streaky black marker arrow pointing to the left.
The thrift store was in the basement, and it smelled like moldy gym clothes. Nearly thirty people hunted and pecked through stacks of jeans, plastic laundry baskets crammed full of shoes, shelves of mismatched dishes.
Ice skates lined the stone windowsills. I took the only pair in my size—jaundiced and creased, with blades so rusty they stained my hand. One boot had no laces, the other, half a tongue.
“Well, if it ain’t Miss Sarah Graham, coming to grub through somebody else’s castoffs.”
“Well, if it
isn’t
Memory Jones, who’s certainly not a miss, and is better at grubbing than anyone I know,” I said.
“Then you don’t know no one,” she said, laughing. “Girl, seeing your sourpuss gone done tickled my toes. And, you know, you take a bit of steel wool to them skates, they’ll be right as rainbows.”
“I’ll remember that. Who’s with Robert?”
“Beatrice Rawlings. She sits with my boy when I gotta stock up on these here shirts,” she said, grinning and lifting her overstuffed grocery bag up for me to see, proud as a hunter who’s shot a prize-winning fowl.
“I would have watched him, if you needed me to.”
“Then you wouldn’t be here,” she said. “And while I got you here, you better be picking out some colors for that rag rug of yours.”
“What rug?”
“The one I’m making for you. Now, go get some.”
She pushed me into the crowd of clothing vultures pawing through the hand-me-downs, the
screech
of hangers against the metal racks echoing in the tiny space. I tugged a forest-colored T-shirt out from between the others, holding it with the tips of three fingers. “Is this good?”
“They wash ’em first, you know. Got a machine just over there,” she said, draping the shirt over her shoulder. “And you’re gonna need eight, ten more. So, just dive on in there.”
I found several other green shirts in varying shades, and chose a few earth-toned ones, and a couple muted blues.
“Okay, I’m done.”
“What about that yellow one?”
“What yellow one?” I asked, though I knew.
“That one there, that you keep picking at and putting back.”
“It’s too bright.” And it was—a vibrant sun color that seemed alien in the dim basement. Out of place, like me. But I couldn’t stop looking at it.
“No, it ain’t,” Memory said. She yanked it from the rack, hanger flipping around the metal bar before it clattered to the stone floor. “See. Perfect. These colors, they be more suiting to your insides.”
“If you say so. You’re the expert.”
“Expert! Ha! Me, Memory Jones, an expert at something. I like that.” She hunkered down to pick up the hanger, and squashed my shirts in with her own. “I gotta get home to my boy. But I’ll be seeing you Sunday.”
She plodded to the counter to pay. I threw a dollar down for my skates and hurried after her. “Wait,” I said. “Let me follow you. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find my way back, especially in the dark.”
“Well, well. I’m fat for sure, but my ears work fine, and I just heard you asking for help. Ain’t never thought I’d hear that, no, ma’am. Not never.”
“I didn’t ask,” I said. “I told. Ordered, really. Demanded.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Never mind. Just go. I’m perfectly capable of getting there myself.”
Memory swung her bag onto the passenger side, then dropped in the driver’s seat, feet still dangling outside, the car sinking a good three or four inches beneath her weight. She slid one thigh under the steering wheel, then the other, inching her bulk around to face forward. “You know, the trouble with stiff-necked folks is they can’t turn their heads from side to side to see what’s coming up behind them,”she said, face flushed, chest heaving. “Close the door, will ya?”
I did, and went to my truck. Memory circled the parking lot, pulling next to me. I rolled down my window. “What now?”
“I forgot to tell ya, I ain’t so good at turning my head neither. And I ain’t never got ’round to gluing my rearview mirror back on after it fell off last winter. So, if somebody got the hankering to follow me, I wouldn’t know it at all.”
She drove away, making a left turn out of the lot. I waited five minutes, counting each blink of the colon on the dashboard’s digital clock. Then I took a left and drove down the road, slowing behind a car at the corner, idling at the stop sign with its hazard lights flashing.
Memory’s car.
Her hazards went dead, and her right directional glinted on, off, on, off, in the dwindling daylight. I considered going the opposite way, but being lost in the dark mountains held even less appeal than admitting to Memory that I needed her help to find my way home. So I pushed my hair behind my ears, clicked my right blinker on, and followed.
I’d left the dry shampoo and brush I bought in the truck so I wouldn’t forget them when I went to the Harrison home. They were for Rabbit. A peace offering.
The drive up the mountain had become routine to me. My body leaned into the familiarity of each bend, my hands knew when to turn the steering wheel, my foot knew when to press the gas, or let off it. Instead of focusing on the road, I let the steady white hum of the engine lull my mind to sleep. Some days, I’d start on Mountain Drive, two roads north of my father’s cabin, and only snap out of my trance when I bounced into the giant pothole just before the Harrison’s turnoff—nearly an hour’s drive—and not remember a single minute between.
I wasn’t paying attention when I whipped around the second-to-last curve before the shack. A deer stood in the road, frozen, its liquid eyes fixed on my truck. I jammed down on the brake with both feet and screamed. The doe bounded into the woods; I saw her white hindquarters flash through the tree trunks as I lurched to a stop, unharmed.
My pulse drummed behind my cheekbones, in my groin. I sat, staring, gulping for breath. When my heart rate slowed to a near-normal pace, I took my feet off the brake pedal. The truck crawled forward, and I drove the last hundred yards without the speedometer crossing ten miles an hour.
Without knocking, I left the grocery bags near Ben and Rabbit’s door, the shampoo and brush tucked under a carton of eggs, a box of powdered milk. Then I drove—slowly, stiffly, eyes scanning each dark nook between the trees—to see Zuriel.
She was in bed when I arrived, still in her nightgown—a plain ecru cotton, worn sheer—knitted shawl draped over her shoulders. Her Bible flopped open on her legs.
“I can’t see the words, but the weight gives me comfort,” she said.
“Are you sick, Zuriel? Should I get Doc?”
“I’m ninety-nine years old, and today I feel like it. Doc can’t fix that.”
She looked gray, lumpy, like a bowl of oatmeal left overnight in the sink. Her eyes were runnier than usual, and her tear sacs bulged purple. I took a Kleenex from the box beside the bed, gave it to her. She blotted the discharge. “Have you eaten?” I asked, concerned. Hiram Dennison dying was one thing, but Zuriel was the grandmother every child wanted, the one in the bedtime stories who kissed bruised knees and made everything better. The grandmother I wished I’d had, the one I eventually stopped praying for when, year after year, my prayers went ignored.
I didn’t want her to die.
She coughed. “Some hot water would be nice.”
“Just hot water?”
“I know, old women are supposed to sit around, knitting and drinking tea. I do enjoy the knitting. The tea? Not so much.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
Zuriel’s kitchen had a freestanding utility sink, a woodburning cookstove, a Hoosier cabinet, and a small table with a microwave oven perched on it—a gift, Zuriel said, from her great-grandson five years ago, when she lost her sight. In another corner, a claw-foot tub and a curtained toilet. This was the only room with plumbing. Zuriel told me when she was a child—before the house had running water, before several of the additions had been built—they kept the tub outside, in the backyard, because there was no other place for it. Her brothers and father would carry it in and out each Saturday, bath day.
I found a chipped teacup hanging on the wall—a line of eyehooks under the window held a dozen of them, mismatched, crazed but clean—and filled it with water, then stuck it in the microwave for forty-five seconds. Stacked on a corner shelf near the cups were plates of different sizes. I found a saucer and brought the water to Zuriel.
“Thank you, dear. I have a chill on the inside, and no amount of blankets will help.”
“I know it; I’m always cold when my neck is bare,” I said, wrapping my own scarf around her. “I don’t have to stay if you’re too tired.”
“Please. I wait all week for your visit. And I believe Miss Marple was about to unmask the villain.”
“I can read your Bible to you, instead, if you want.”
Zuriel smiled. “How wonderful.” She gave me the Bible, then clasped her hands together and closed her pus-filled eyes.
“Where should I start?”
“Anywhere is fine.”
I bent the soft cover with my thumb, quickly flipping through the whispery pages. Then I turned to Jack’s passage, the one he mentioned on Christmas, the beginning of John, chapter nine.
The story of the man born blind so that Jesus could perform his miracle. I continued reading, how the man went to the temple after he was healed and the religious leaders scoffed at him, accusing him of fraud. When the man’s parents testified that their son was indeed born blind, the Pharisees again interrogated the man, trying to scare him into recanting, and finally forced him from the temple.
I closed the book. I couldn’t take anymore. But Zuriel said, “That is one of my favorite passages. Now I have a story to tell you. About that piano.”
I looked at it, hunkered in the shadows, thick-legged and dull with dust. “I’ve wondered about it.”
“When I begin to forget what it looks like, I run my hands over it, all those carvings and dimples. I think of my mother. She would let the babies bang on the keys, and it always sounded beautiful to her.
“I’ve told you my grandmother was a slave.”
I nodded, and then said, “Yes,” because she couldn’t see my head move.
“Her parents worked a plantation in Virginia, and she was taken from them when she was nine or ten, sold somewhere a bit more south. One of the Carolinas, I believe.
My grandmother thought she’d die of lonesome and fear, but the mistress of the plantation took a liking to her. Her own daughter had died just months before my grandmother came to work there, and they were the same age. It’s easier, I suppose, to love a stranger when she’s the same size and shape as the hole in your own heart, even if she happens to be a little slave girl.
“The mistress taught Grandmother to read and write. She gave her nice dresses and sang to her sometimes. The other house slaves were quite jealous. They sometimes stole my grandmother’s clothes when the mistress let her take a bath, or fed her supper to the dogs. Once, they beat her with spoons. It was the only beating she ever received, at the hands of her own. When the mistress found out, she ordered five lashes for all the women involved, but my grandmother pleaded for mercy, and the mistress relented.
“When my grandmother was sixteen, she married my grandfather. He was a field slave. They jumped over a broom and were married, just like that. The plantation master turned up dead soon after, drowned in his whisky and vomit. The farm was sold, and the mistress called my grandmother into her parlor and said to her, ‘Do you want a new master?’
“ ‘No ma’am,’ ” my grandmother said.
“ ‘Nor I,’ the mistress said. ‘I’m going north. Come with me.’
“My grandmother said she couldn’t go without Grandfather, and the mistress told her to bring him, too.”
Zuriel took a sip of her water, cold now, trembling hand bringing the cup to her mouth. “It took four grown men to load that piano on the wagon. The mistress wouldn’t leave without it. She took some clothes, a few baubles, and the piano. It was just months before the war began, and they rode all the way to New York, where the mistress had kin. She became ill during the trip, and was dying. She gave Grandmother and Grandfather their free papers.
“But my grandmother loved that woman; she stayed and took care of her. When the mistress died, she left my grandmother five acres of land, some wilderness that her husband had won in a gambling game. This land. And the piano.”
She smiled at the memory. “The story is, my grandfather used a mule and some logs to get that piano up this mountain, cussing all the way. It’s been in that same spot since then. One day it’s going to fall through the floor. Even when they were starving, when we were starving, no one ever thought of selling that piano. My sister learned to one-finger ‘Amazing Grace,’ and we would all stand around it and sing as loud as we could. But it hasn’t been played proper since it came here.
“The mistress, her name was Sarah, too. Sarah Chappell. My grandparents took her family name because they didn’t have one of their own.
“Could you do something for me, child?”
“Of course. Anything,” I said.
“Next time you come here, could you bring some furniture polish and a cloth, and maybe just clean that piano off a little?” she asked. “It certainly deserves a bit of pampering, a regal instrument like that. And it doesn’t need my smeary fingerprints all over it.”
“I will.”
“Ah, well, I think I’ll have my nap now.” She scooted down under the blankets, head sinking into the down pillow. “You know, the scarf did help. I’m much warmer.”
