JEWEL (54 page)

“There’s a rust stain down near to the bottom, in the center. It’s a rust stain, a circle.” He paused, brought the hand down.

I saw the stain, saw the faintest trace where an already rusty and old screen was even rustier, then looked at him.

He was smiling at me, slowly shook his head. He said, “You don’t remember.”

“It’s the boys’ old room, ” I said. “That what you’re after? ” He gave a small laugh. His eyes went to the window again, and he nodded at it, said, “That’s the boys’ room, right. But that stain. That stain’s where Burton and Wilman used to pee when they was too tired or scared or cold to head out to the privy.” He paused, still smiling.

“That is, before we had the indoor plumbing.” He looked at me again.

“You remember? ” “Yes, ” I said, and nodded, at the same moment felt myself suddenly falling into the chasm he’d led me to, felt myself smiling all the way down into a darkness he wanted us to hole up in the rest of our days, that abyss called Memory. He wanted me to spend the rest of my life like he and Toxie did every evening he was over, the two of them out on the porch as the sun set behind cypress and oak, them both talking on what they’d done with their days.

I was falling because I could hear two boys’ whispers like silver in the night, steps to a window, that window sliding up slowly, as though we wouldn’t hear the long quiet pull of wood on wood as the window went up.

I closed my eyes a moment out there in the heat, and heard those sounds again, even above the crickets, of two boys peeing out a second-story window, their whispers, silent laughter, all of it right here in my ears.

I opened my eyes, looked at the house, took it in in the way Leston was doing, the clapboards were still the same white, though the paint’d blistered up, what little lawn there was out here was trimmed up, short, whoever lived here at least wanted that much to look nice.

But it was our house, I saw, the same one that’d been illuminated by the headlights of the old Plymouth ten years ago as Leston’d pulled out and away from our old lives, Wilman and Anne and Brenda Kay all asleep in the back seat, and I fell even deeper, faster toward the point Leston was aiming me for.

I smiled, and Leston nodded again at the screen, said, “Those two boys were goobers, too.” He looked at me, smiled, and started round the side of the house.

Brenda Kay and I followed, the lawn in the side yard just as neat and trim as that in front, and I reached out, touched the side of the house like it was some big and hairy beast. I just touched it, afraid it might move, might jump at me, memories cascading down on me so hard.

To my right was the barn, behind it the repair shed, neither of them any more broken-down now than when Toxie and Sepulcher disappeared in there each morning to fiddle with the engines on the machinery we’d owned. I caught glimpses, too, of the field back behind the shed where we’d kept the cattle before selling it off, and where, later, we’d grown sweet potatoes to sell for medicine for Brenda Kay.

Calcium glucanate, I remembered. Some sort of drug these backwoods doctors figured on curing mental retardation, and I smiled shook my head.

We were behind the house now, spread out in front of us the woods into which I’d let Brenda Kay walk just to see where she went, a teenage boy named Burton following behind her, and I remembered him stopping at the edge, kicking the dirt with his toe, him the undercover man, and I shook my head at this, too, me smiling.

“What’s so funny? ” Leston said. I turned from the woods to him there with a hand up to his forehead, us no longer hidden from the sun by the house.

I said, “I’m smiling at just exactly what you want me to, I know it, ” and finally let go Brenda Kay’s hand. This was safe haven here a place more familiar than the faces of my grandchildren, more comfortable than a down bed in a mansion in Purvis proper. Here we were.

I smiled, came toward him. A piece of me was ready to surrender to it all, to this point he was trying so very hard to make by visiting these old places, we had come a long way in our lives, had beaten more than most people were handed out. That house six feet above ground on the bayou was, in some ways, a palace. Our boys and girls were men and women now.

And as I came nearer him, I remembered those mornings with the children even sharper, even clearer, remembered the tussling and fighting between Burton and Wilman and Annie, her tagging along, and I remembered Billie Jean when she was only a girl, before she’d lost the piece of herself she’d given to Gower Cross, and before she’d found, I could only imagine, the heavy and ugly knowledge only going through a divorce could bring.

I moved closer to Leston. In spite of all the waves I wanted crashing l l in my head and the feel of cold, thick fog round me, even in spite of all we had to do in California to save our baby daughter, those waves and that gray started to melting away with each minute we stood out here in the sun beside our old house. This was our home, I was beginning to see. And I was headed straight for what, I figured deep down in a place I was about to stop listening to, would certainly be our deaths, Leston’s, mine, Brenda Kay’s.

Still, I touched his chest with one hand, smiled up at him, the sun lighting his face. Here was the man I’d sworn allegiance to, the man I’d married, the one who came even before all the Before this house brought with it. Before, though it seemed there’d never existed such a time, even Brenda Kay. This was the man. I am your wife, I heard rise up in me, and smiled at the man who’d built this home for us.

I let my hand go to his face, placed my palm at his cheek, gently rubbed there with my thumb, this touch just the smallest utterance of the dying language of love our bodies’d once spoken. This was Leston.

I said, “You know I love you.”

He reached up, took my hand, and I could feel the strength in him, in his calluses and rough skin and bones and muscles.

He said, “I love you too, Jewel.” I said, “Scene of the crime, ” still smiling.

“Scene of the crime, ” he said. He grinned, let go my hand.

He put his hands in his back pockets then, looked past me back toward the barn, just my husband after all, this moment of closeness maybe a bit too much, or maybe just enough, he shrugged, still grinning.

Without letting his eyes light on mine, he said, “Think I’ll have a go look to the shed. See what shape she’s in.”

He glanced down at me, shrugged again, and started away. “Brenda Kay, ” he called out, “you want to come see the old barn and shed I built?

” “Momma? ” Brenda Kay said. She was waiting for me, eyebrows up, mouth open, those white teeth.

“Brenda Kay? ” Leston said. He was next to her now. He was still smiling, but I could see it was something he had to think about. He knew what was going on, his own daughter stood next to him, but waited for me to nod, to signal what she should do.

Leston put out a hand to her, him turned to the barn, Brenda Kay turned to me. He reached down, took hold her hand, gave it a small shake.

“Come on now, ” he said without looking at me. “Let’s go.”

Brenda Kay’s hand was dead in his, her eyes still trained on me. I said, “Now you do what your daddy says, ” and I nodded, smiled.

She turned, went right away with Leston, and I watched the two of them march off hand in hand along a path clouded over with green.

I turned back to the house. Scene of the crime, I thought, and I went to the steps up to the kitchen door, steps I’d mounted too many times to count, after calling my children in from the woods, or hauling up the breakfast plates the coloreds stacked on the ground next to the bottom step, or carrying up the wind-dried sheets and towels and clothing, and I thought of the sheets I’d hung earlier this afternoon, wondered if they’d be dry by the time we got home.

I stood at the bottom of the steps, put one hand on the rail, and suddenly all those times I’d mounted them didn’t seem such a burden, such a chore, and I saw I was about to hit the bottom of that abyss Leston’d led me to, the one I’d tottered over and into all by myself.

It was my resolve I was about to lose, I saw.

I lifted a foot, set it on the first step up. This was comfortable, the wood strong and sturdy, exactly what I needed to feel beneath me while I carried up a load of laundry or a child with a skinned knee or an apron full of summer squash or corn, and so I took another step, and another, let my hand on the rail guide me up and up, closer and closer to the kitchen door window.

Finally I made it to the top of the steps, stood on the little porch there. I cupped my hands to the window, looked in at my own kitchen, and knew it was me, me, I wanted to glimpse walking across the floor in there, a skillet of bacon and eggs in my hand, my apron for a potholder, and hoped, too, I’d see Burton and Wilman come tearing into the room, Annie right behind them, trailing nye-nye and crying for them to wait for her. It was all of that I wanted to see, and knew I would if I let myself, let the ghosts of past lives, ones I’d thought for years were behind me, breathe all over in me, illuminate this old kitchen.

And suddenly there was movement inside, a swirl of color and shape before my eyes so that I had only time enough to swallow, feel my heart lurch and heave with what I saw. I staggered back a step, saw before me a girl in a flowered dress as she swung open the door, a hand to a hip, her head to one side.

She said, “What y’all want? ” and I saw her dirty blond hair fall off one shoulder, saw smeared red across her lips, her bare feet.

She was just a girl, a girl no older than and I’d had to think a moment on who she seemed no older than, and the only girl who came to mind was my own baby daughter, my Brenda Kay, tromping round in a broken-down barn just then.

“Well? ” the girl said. She quick tilted her head the other way, a hand still at her hip, the other on the doorknob.

“I ” I started, but didn’t know how I might lead her to see what I’d hoped I might find inside my old kitchen.

“We, ” I said, and now she’d taken to tapping a toe on the floor, the I I floor painted a dark red, and not the old stained wood we’d had it.

“We just were looking at the place, ” I said.

“We saw you, ” she said right out, but then her face lost its edge, retreated to reveal she was in fact only a girl, no woman in charge of this place. She blinked, said, “I saw you, ” and brought her head up straight, let go the doorknob, put that hand to her hip. She gritted her teeth, tried to regain whatever power she’d had over me, but she’d lost it.

“Somebody in there with you? ” I said, and crossed my arms.

She gave the quickest glance to her left, tried to see behind her without looking all the way. Then she drew in a breath, seemed to kick her elbows out at her sides even broader, hold her shoulders even higher, and I knew I was wrong about how old she was, knew only then she was at most fifteen.

It’d been in the hair, the color and snarl of it, that I’d misjudged her age, and in that lipstick, the dress. It was a Saturday-night dress, puffed short sleeves, the skirt just above the knees, the flowers in the material a shade too bright, the neckline cut just a breath too low.

The dress buttoned up the front, starting at the waist, and as she brought up her shoulders I could see where she’d missed a couple buttons, the two below the top one. It was a dress a little too tight for her, a girl with breasts, I could see, that’d send her at her age out to find lipstick, to color her hair this shade, to buy a cheap dress a size too small, and I wondered who her momma was, and where she might be, and who the boy inside the house with her was.

Because as she stood taller in some child’s attempt at intimidating an old woman who’d seen all I’d seen about the way this world works, from the quick and simple death of a father to the slow and hateful one of her mother, from the birth of a retarded child to the arc of a basketball in a high school gym, I saw between the open front of her dress the two curves of flesh where her breasts met, small turns of pale-milk skin men lived their lives to find, where only minutes before, I knew, some boy most likely no older than herself had found strange comfort, a feeling I figured must be foreign and familiar at once, some memory of a mother’s breast buried deep inside him, at the same time a dream of the future, of the moment when he might enter her and the world would be his, so that memory and the future were locked in the same moment, the same touch of tongue on flesh, the body able to accomplish with no more than mere human touch what it was I wanted in my life, to remember what’d gone before me, but to push out to what might be.

Only then did I see I hadn’t yet fallen into the abyss, but still tottered there, still stood with my toes on the edge, about to fall toward the end of a life that’d be spent here, in Mississippi, among the bones of my old dead lives, ghosts or no ghosts. I said, “You’re showing, honey, ” and nodded at her chest.

She looked down at herself, saw the buttons, started doing them up, when from behind her came the boy’s voice, “Tell em to head out.”

She still fumbled with the buttons, glanced at me, said, “You heard that.”

I said, “My husband built this house, ” and I turned, not because of the boy’s words, but because there seemed nothing more to say. I took each step down from the porch one at a time, savored them for what they were, past history.

But when I reached bottom I turned, looked up at her, and it seemed there was something else I wanted to say, on my own tongue words I figured might help her, and might help me.

She stood with a hand back on the doorknob, the other at her side.

I said, “Don’t let a man speak your mind.” I paused, said, “You want us out, you tell us.”

She took a breath, glanced behind her again. She stood straight again, said, “You head on out now.”

“Fine, ” I said, and I nodded at her, smiled.

She closed the door, but stood at the window a moment. She turned her head away from the glass, and I could see through the window her shake her head, that dirty blonde hair moving back and forth in long locks.

Then she faced me again.

I put up a hand, gave a small wave, hoped whatever it was happened here wouldn’t be lost on her, or on me Her face was blank, no look to it at all. Just her eyes on me, that hair down the sides of her face, her smeared lips.