JEWEL (25 page)

But once I’d gotten him to speak out on the open water, once I’d heard our story in his words, there’d been in me my own desire for this, so that as I lifted my skirts to him, helped him myself with his jeans buttons and gently lifted the suspenders off his shoulders, then felt him inside me for the first time in all that while, there rose in me the low moans, the sounds I’d heard our first night together in a hotel in Hattiesburg. There rose up around us the ghosts of my momma and daddy, the sounds they two made, and I couldn’t help but remember our wedding night, couldn’t help but recall the fear I’d felt, the trembling I’d made at his touch, the two of us finally alone. He’d been seated on the edge of the bed, me standing before him, and he undressed me with careful hands, my dress taking months to find its way free of buttons and clasps, his big hands fumbling, trembling of their own. He was young then, only a boy, me only a girl, our bodies new and unexplained, and when finally my dress fell away from around me, and then my petticoats and slip and underclothes, he’d leaned back, taking me in with his eyes.

And then I undressed him, and we started in on the long and beautiful task of learning each other.

The love we made on this day, in a canoe on Ashe Lake, seemed as close to that first time as I could imagine, yet it was different, changed in that I found comfort in the ghosts my sounds brought forth, sounds that now, too, Leston gave out, we two in our forties and making love like the children we were that first night, the canoe rocking, water sloshing beneath us. There was comfort in the ghosts of my parents, some sort of reconciliation, peace in the unformed words Leston and I made, me understanding suddenly what it must have been like for my own mother to make love each Saturday night to a man who’d already left her, a man she might never get back, and I wondered if my being here, now, him deep inside me, my arms around his shoulders, my mouth kissing his forehead, I might bring Leston back from across the deep chasm that’d formed since Brenda Kay’d been born, from the dark world he lived nights, sullen with the knowledge he had no work, that his children were growing up and away, his wife’s life filled with a retarded child, and the cold knowledge the daughter he’d fathered would never be right, never be just a girl, a beautiful, normal girl named for Leston’s beautiful sister.

But then the other purpose took shape in me, twisted itself into form and being, and I remembered California, remembered the truth and promise that seemed to shine from that word. Leston could find work there, I knew, Billie Jean’d go with no more than the clothes on her back. Burton and Wilman and Annie were too young yet to disapprove.

And there was the care out there being offered for Brenda Kay, just waiting for us, waiting.

I opened my eyes then, saw cut across the blue above us a single lonely crow, crying out loud and fierce. Just a single crow across sky, and for a moment I couldn’t but feel myself somehow like Bessy, trading on my body and what it could do for whatever needs presented themselves, and I remembered her scars, long and cold and purple, and wondered, too, what sort of scars my plan to leave this place, to escape Mississippi like it was a nigger shanty about to collapse, would leave on me, and would leave on Leston.

Shadows of bulrushes started to fall across us, and I held Leston even tighter, closed my eyes.

Later, heading back, I said, “Leston, we can do better by our family.”

They were the only words came to me for all the thinking I’d done on how to tell him.

“How so, ” he said, and pulled the paddle through another stroke. The sun was still high, a little behind me, and shone on him, gave even more color to his face. He was on his third cigarette since we’d finished in the bulrushes. This was the first we’d spoken. l l

“I have an idea, ” I said, and stopped. This was it, where all I’d thought over was going to come out.

“I have an idea, ” I said, “that we ought to think on moving from here.”

He was quiet, pulled through another stroke. He said, “From Purvis.”

“From Purvis, ” I said. “From, maybe, Mississippi.”

“You want to move to New Orleans, ” he said, the cigarette at his lips bobbing with his words. It wasn’t a question, but what he’d figured the answer to all this. “Or thereabouts, ” he went on. He stopped paddling a moment, thought better of it, started in again. “Driving in to New Orleans every few weeks to see a doctor don’t make it necessary to move there.” He drew on the cigarette, the tip going bright.

“Not New Orleans, ” I said, and swallowed hard. I said, “Not New Orleans. But to a place where Brenda Kay can get what she needs, a place where there’s an opportunity for things.” I paused. “Things for all of us.”

“Things, ” he said. “Things.”

“Like good care. Like something akin to a school. Like maybe a school or something for Brenda Kay.” I swallowed again. “Jobs, too. Good jobs.”

He brought the paddle from the water entirely, laid it in his lap again.

He squinted at me, took the cigarette from his lips, shot out smoke.

“Who put these big ideas in your head? ” he said. “One guess.”

“No one, ” I said, and then I said, “The Reader’s Digest is where.

There’s a place in California where ” “California, ” he said, and with that he flicked the cigarette, this one not even halfway done, off into the green water, picked up the paddle, and started in.

“California, ” I said again, “is where there’s a school for Mongoloids, ” and I stopped, my last word big and clumsy and strange out here on water, beneath a spring sky, a word that cut off whatever others were lined up in me, stopped them all.

“California, ” he breathe , the word almost lost in the whisper he gave.

He pulled the paddle out again, set it across his lap. He sat up straight, brought a hand to his forehead to block the sun.

He wasn’t looking at me, but behind me and to my right. I scooted around in my seat, tried to see behind me.

We were out fifty yards or so from where we’d put in, afternoon shadows darkening our picnic spot. I couldn’t see Annie anywhere, nor Burton or Wilman.

But there lay Billie Jean on her back on the red wool blanket, Brenda Kay straddling her, the two of them lost in whatever game they were up to.

Billie Jean turned her head, saw us. “Hey! ” she hollered from where she lay, and waved.

Slowly Brenda Kay’s head turned our way, and after a moment that seemed to last longer than all the time Leston and I’d been away, her voice came to me across that green water, traveled as slow and precise as the sun across the sky.

“Momma! ” she cried.

CHAPTER 17.

ALL I COULD HEAR WAS THE RINGING IN MY EARS, THE LOUD RUSH OF blood through me that choked out everything else, whatever sounds were around me as I ran through the halls of the same hospital my baby Brenda Kay’d been born in, just ahead of me Wilman, his strides long and easy, a man now near on tall as Leston. He was way ahead of me, and had to stop now and again, in his eyes as he turned the fear and pain of what he already knew, what he’d already seen.

Finally, somewhere in the middle of a hall on the second floor, he held out a hand to me, and when I made it to him I took it, held it tight, and we ran together.

He slowed down, pointed to an open door to our left, and I let go his hand, went on into the room without waiting for breath, without waiting for the ringing to stop.

Inside were doctors and nurses, all huddled round the bed. But as I came near they parted, stood aside for me. I didn’t even look at them, only at the bed, and at Brenda Kay Lying there.

“My momma! ” she screamed, “My momma! ” and her arms went up to me, arms, I thanked God, that hadn’t been burned in the fire, and I saw that her eyebrows, eyebrows that’d been the same fine auburn of her hair, had been scorched off, me still knowing so little of what happened, only the few words Wilman’d forced out to me on the ride from the cafeteria here.

Only that there’d been a fire, and that Brenda Kay’d been burned.

“I’m here, honey, I’m here, ” was all I could say, those the best words I could offer. “I’m here, my baby, I’m here. I’m right here.”

As I hugged her, held her tight to me, I listened to her crying, heard her sob in a new way I’d never heard from her before, a cry too deep, too strong. And I thanked my God I could be here, and found myself cursing Him in the very same breath.

I held her.

She feel asleep in my arms, her own arms gone limp as she gave in to it, but I held her close in her sleep another ten or fifteen minutes, just to let her know I was there.

Still, she whimpered in her sleep, and when I finally let her go, the sound of her whimpering was thick in the air, the soft and quick moans she gave out blasting to pieces, finally, that ringing in my ears.

Even as the doctors started in on telling me what’d happened, it seemed their words were only being built around my Brenda Kay’s pain. Every whimper she gave blotted out a phrase or two of what healing I could hope for, what the chances of her legs being usable again were, how long before skin might come back.

Her whimpering even whited out most of what I saw, so that none of the doctors had faces, voices, just as the nurses hovering round me and Brenda Kay were only women in white dresses, all their hair the same color.

Not until one of those nurses took hold my hand and as one of the doctors pulled back the sheet that lay across Brenda Kay did things come alive for me. It was as if I’d entered the room brand-new and unafraid, my eyes cold as I looked at my baby daughter’s legs, saw what God’d deemed necessary at this point in her and my life both, a point three years past when I’d started in on my husband to move us away from this place.

What I saw, Her legs had been burned up to midthigh, her right worse than the left. I took in without blinking, without swallowing, the image of blackened skin on her right leg from her ankle on up, skin rumpled and bunched and black, burned on the top and sides, the little I could see of the backs of her legs pale pink where the fire hadn’t found her out. Her left leg wasn’t as badly burned, but the skin there, too, was bunched and blistered where the fire had crept, from midshin to just above her knee, skin gray and red and mottled, already oozing.

Then her smell came to me, the smell of burnt flesh, the sour smoldering and stink of her Lying there.

I closed my eyes, closed them, and felt the air in the room rush past me, as though the roof were lifting off, me with it, and I disappeared.

Wilman squatted before me. I was in a chair, I knew, in a hospital hallway, and this was my son, Wilman, his face close to mine, his forehead wrinkled, mouth pursed, eyes searching for something.

Me, I saw. He was looking for me, and I blinked a few times, took in a breath.

“I fainted, ” I said, and I tried to stand, felt my legs do nothing, gone to sleep of their own. I pushed on the arms of the chair, tried to get my legs to work, to move me.

“Momma, ” he said, and placed his big hands on my shoulders, held me down. “Momma, ” he said again, “you need to have a seat here. You need to sit here for a while. That’s what the doctor said.”

I’m right here, I thought, right here, and still his eyes were looking for me, searching my face for some sign of recognition, as though it’d been me who’d been burned, my face consumed by flame, and for a long moment, and then for many days and weeks and months and years I wished it’d been me in there on the hospital bed, and I asked myself again, because it seemed there would never be anyone else I could ask this, not even my God Himself, Is this how He smites on us?

Cathe raltd been the one to blame, because blame was what I was after, blame the only thing I had the right to here. My baby’d been burned to where every waking moment she spent for the first two weeks in that hospital were taken up with her crying, holding on to me fierce and hard, leaving bruises on my shoulders I could see in the hospital bathroom mirror when I washed myself at night.

She’d been watching over Brenda Kay like every day I worked at the cafeteria, and the story I’d been handed by Billie Jean and Wilman and even Annie was the same, but it was the story handed them by Cathe ral, my children’d all been at school or work themselves, Cathe ral was sweeping up in the boys’ old bedroom, Wilman the only one living there now.

Burton’d moved out to California five months before to find whatever fortune he thought was there, that idea of California planted by me through all the quiet conversations I’d had with Leston on the subject, me talking at him from across the kitchen table in the middle of the night for the last three years. I’d talked about and showed him and read to him the literature I’d received, brochures shiny and crisp that outlined what the National Association for Retarded Children could do for Brenda Kay out there in Los Angeles. And Burton’d overheard, and Burton graduated from Purvis High and worked a summer at the ice cream plant in Columbia and took in enough money to buy a run-down pickup truck and move. Nothing to it, Just pure and cold resolve in my son, and as he’d driven off, waved back at us through the small window of the cab, I couldn’t help but envy him and at the same time feel glad I’d handed him on something I could lay claim to, that resolve. He’d gotten a job out there right off, working at a muffler shop welding mufflers onto cars, all the thousands and thousands of bright and new and perfect cars he saw out there every day. Now and again he sent a dress to Billie Jean or Annie or Brenda Kay, and postcards once a week of piers and seagulls and violet mountains and short green trees clustered with bright oranges. And I’d gotten a hat, burgundy with a tiny veil across the front brim. I hadn’t yet had enough nerve to wear it into our church, . L where I could just imagine the words that’d pass between women, The mother of a retarded child strutting in with a hat like that!

I swar!

And, too, he’d sent his daddy a lighter, a brass and stainless steel lighter Leston carried with him everywhere he went, even in the pocket of his pale green coveralls, his uniform for work at the ice cream plant. He worked piling fifty-pound sacks of sugar onto pallets five days a week now, the job his son had left behind.