JEWEL (8 page)

“I don’t know nothing about James, ” she said, and blinked. Nelson said, “We don’t know nothing about that.” His voice curled through the black around him, the words coming to me like an echo.

She looked down again, moved her foot on the ground. The light from the kitchen grew stronger the darker the world became, until now she stood in a hard rectangle of light from the doorway behind me, my shadow on the ground her only interruption.

She poked her heel in the dirt, tapped it twice, took in a deep breath.

She lifted her head to me, swallowed. “I say unto you that the baby you be carrying be yo’ hardship, be yo’ test in this world. This be my prophesying unto you, Miss Jewel.”

Nelson leaned into the light, reached toward her. All I could see of him was his arm and shoulder and head in the light from my kitchen.

His hand touched her elbow, and he glanced up at me, then at the porch steps.

“Come on, now, ” he whispered.

Cathe ral didn’t move.

Slowly I shook my head, made myself smile. “What are you saying? ” I said. “Why do you say this? ” Cathe ral smiled, let the quilt loosen, slip an inch or so off of her neck. “The Lord say to tell you, Miss Jewel, ” she said. “You and me both know He work in mysterious ways.

But this not any mystery. He telling you right out. He letting you know. He smiling on you this way.”

I felt my palms begin to sweat out there in the cold. I went to the edge of the porch, moved down one step.

“Momma, ” Billie Jean called out, on her voice the whine she’d perfected in the last year or so, “close the door or come back inside.

It’s cold!

” “Momma? ” Annie said.

Nelson gently pulled at her elbow. “Come let’s go, ” he whispered.

But Cathe ral and I were still looking at each other. I moved down another step, then another, until I was only a foot or so from her, her eyes on mine, her smile still there.

I put out a hand, cold with sweat, held it in front of me. I wasn’t

..

.

smllmg anymore.

From beneath the quilt one of her hands appeared, took hold of mine.

She squeezed down with some unknown might. l “We sorry, Miss Jewel, ” Nelson said, and now he tugged at her arm. “We going on home now. We don’t mean to burden you.”

“The Lord smiling down on you this way, ” she said again, and then Cathe ral let go, her hand disappearing into the quilt. She moved out of the light.

I tried to watch them go, but they were lost to me even before they made it past the repair shed. There was no moon out, not enough stars to do any good. Just God above with some plan for us all.

I didn’t know what to think, whether to believe her or not, and I tried to imagine how news like this could be of help, and whether that unaccountable piece of God Cathe ral had hold of could be trusted to figure into the stone wedge of Him I knew.

The light I stood in broke to pieces, shadows falling about me, and I turned, looked up to the doorway. There stood James and Wilman and Burton, the three of them, all my boys, crowded into the doorway.

Wilman and Burton pushed at each other for room, while James, a boy suddenly taller than I ever imagined he might become, stood still, one hand to the doorjamb. “Momma, ” he said, “what’s going on out here? ” I shrugged, uncertain myself. I only knew I was cold out here, and that somewhere along the road headed away from Purvis walked Nelson and Cathe ral, the dark of no consequence to them. And I knew there was a baby in me. “Nothing, ” I said, and I shrugged again.

“Jewel, ” Leston called, the word neither question nor demand. Only my name.

“I’m here, ” I said, and started up the steps.

CHAPTER 5.

OUR HEADLIGHTS CUT THROUGH THE BLACK WOODS BEFORE US, THE ROAD into Purvis unfolding like some mystery, a place I’d never been before. The baby’d been trying to make its way out for the last fifteen hours, my mind long past battling with making sense of this world. There was only movement, darkness, light, an old, oiled road, and Leston hunched up over the steering wheel, a cigarette at his lips.

“Just hold on, Sugar, ” he whispered, and I thought I might have seen the tip of the cigarette bobbing with the words. “Sug, you just hold on.”

“Sug, ” I managed to get out, and closed my eyes, the work of keeping my lids open too much to bear. “Sug, ” I whispered again, and thought of how I hadn’t heard him call me that in years, not since we were newly married and still in the years when whatever future a future that would account for five children bore in these Mississippi woods seemed somebody else’s life, not our own.

But then we must have hit a pothole or someplace where rains had dug into the road, because the world sank beneath me, and I fell what felt two feet deep into the seat, my ears filled with the roar of our slamming on through it, and I let out a yelp through no choice of my own, both hands on my belly.

“Son of a bitch, ” Leston whispered. “Son of a bitch, Sug.”

The other five had been born at home, all of them so quick that with Wilman there hadn’t been time enough for Cathe ral to make her way over to deliver him. James’d taken the longest with his six hours, Cathe ral’s presence each time as much a comfort to me for her friendship as for her skill at midwifing.

This time she’d been to my door faster than any time before, showing up not an hour after I’d sent Burton for her, Cathe ral all puffing, the washed-out blue dress that hung on her sweat through, her hair pulled back and knotted. Her eyes were right on mine as she came into the bedroom, Annie sitting in bed beside me.

“Now you move on out of here, baby-doll, ” she’d said to Anne, though her eyes were still on mine. “Our Lord be blessing you soon enough with another brother or sister, but right now you go play with the ones you got.”

Annie had looked to me, and I’d turned to her, smiled, though I could feel another wave moving into me. “Go on, ” I said.

She slid away from me and off the quilt, dropped to the floor, her nye-nye tight in one hand. She backed out the room, and I heard Wilman say from just outside the door, “Annie, let’s go out and we’ll play kick the can, hey? ” then the shuffle of feet down the stairs.

“This one be the quickest yet, you think? ” Cathe ral’d said, smiling now.

I’d started to nod, but the pain swept into me, mindless pain that wouldn’t even let me answer her, and she’d taken my hand, squeezed it hard. I closed my eyes, felt her settle herself next to me on the bed.

Id sent Burton first to Cathe ral’s, then to find his father, the crew working its way through the woods out past Jacob’s Ferry Road, a good four miles from Cathe ral’s. I hadn’t counted on them showing up for quite a while, maybe even after this baby was born, new life in here a giant surprise for Leston when he drove in. Then I heard the engine on one of the trucks moving up the road outside, the slam shut of doors, the hurried banging upstairs.

I opened my eyes, saw the two of them moving into the room, Leston, hat in hand, eyebrows furrowed, Burton just behind him, his hair wet, cheeks flushed. Cathe ral stood, moved away and to the washstand beneath the one window, her back to us, and Leston came toward me. He let go the hat with one hand, and touched my cheek. He smiled, and I could smell gunpowder and pine tar and engine oil all at once.

I said, “What time is it? ” and heard how weak my voice had become, a clouded whisper in the room.

Cathe ral looked over her shoulder at Burton, who hesitated only a moment after he’d met her eyes.

“Momma, ” he said, “I’ll be outside if you need anything else.” He crossed his arms, held them tight to his chest. I nodded, said, “My big man.”

He looked down, embarrassed, but then smiled, said, “Take care, Momma, ” and he was gone.

“It’s five-thirty, ” Leston said, both hands at his hat again, and the old pictures of bearing my other children started coming in, Leston awkward and delicate when Cathe ral came, as if he were a guest come to visit the near-dead in his own home, the shapes in the hard stucco of the ceiling in this room, shapes I turned into mountains and foreign countries and the grown-up faces of the children I was bearing as I lay here, my fingernails digging into the pine headboard above me until blood came from beneath my nails with the last few pushes, each child I had James and Billie Jean in the cabin on Rosehill Road, Wilman and Burton and Anne right here as Cathe ral surrendered them to me, wiped clean and swaddled, ready for my breast.

“You be passed out for a time, Miss Jewel, ” Cathe ral said, still at the washstand, and then I realized what Leston had said, Five-thirty.

I’d sent Burton a little past one to Cathe ral’s.

“Five-thirty? ” I whispered, and Leston seemed to move back from me, still smiling.

“We would have been here a touch earlier, but Burton lost himself in the woods for a time.” He paused, swallowed. “How soon before this one? ” he said, and he touched my cheek again, this time his fingers there for only an instant before he brought them back to the hat.

“Only the Lord know, ” Cathe ral said. She came back to the bed, touched her wrist to my forehead. “Right now, Mr. Hilburn, you be a better help to God and his mercies you head on downstairs. I let you know what going on up here.”

“Oh, ” he said, then, “Fine.” He almost seemed to bow, and backed out the room. “Take care, ” he said.

I smiled, nodded as he pulled the door closed behind him.

Cathe ral took her hand away from me. I said, “I never passed out before.”

Her eyes wouldn’t meet mine as she sat down next to me again. She said, “Every birthing different, Miss Jewel. You know that.”

By nine, nothing had changed, every five minutes or so huge gusts of pain pushed through me, my belly separate from me then, some white-hot curse and blessing at once, me wanting it out more each time that pain came. But each time there was Cathe ral at the foot of the bed, her saying, “You just breathe now. Go on and breathe, ” her eyes focused between my legs, my knees up, the thin sheets wet with my sweat and heavy as wool blankets. It was only October, the day had been as warm as any the last month, trees and vines and kudzu only in the last few days losing the deep and sturdy green they’d held all summer to the dull wax sheen that signaled fall was coming on. Annie’d spent the morning and early afternoon beside me, while I made breakfast for the crew, dinner for the boys and Billie Jean once they came home from school. And then I’d felt the first one come, the first pain that started at the top, just below my breasts, and shivered slowly down me, that first small push telling me God’d already decided this would be the day. And I’d sent Burton.

But now was the time, I told myself, those pains on me for eight I hours straight, the word Push heavy in my head. I closed my eyes, bit down hard on my bottom lip, the pain and blood taste there only a small and welcome distraction to what I felt below my heart. I let go my belly, reached for the headboard, held on tight.

“Oh no, no, Miss Jewel, ” Cathe ral said, and I heard her move from where she sat, felt her rough hands touch my cheek, my chin, brush back my hair. “You can’t do this now. Yo’ body ain’t be ready for this now.

All in the Lord’s good time.” She paused, and I felt her hand in my hair, her touch comfort. Slowly the pain eased, and I pictured in my head a lone tree somewhere, a young sycamore bent to a heavy wind, that wind easing, green branches lifting up to blue sky.

“This baby just be borning different from the others, ” she whispered, and I opened my eyes. She was looking at her hand, her eyes wet, half-closed. “I will stand upon my watch, ” she said, “and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved.” Her forehead, I could see even through the haze of this long in labor, was wet with sweat, and I wondered what she knew and wouldn’t say.

I opened my mouth, formed the words my head stirred up, wanted spoken, but my eyes closed, and I felt the room begin to tumble, felt the center of it, my belly, become some fire wouldn’t go out. I dug my nails deeper, trying to hold on, keep the bed from spinning me off the face of the earth, but I disappeared.

I came to at the sound of whispers, voices swimming up, my mother whispering in another room, and my grandmother whispering, too, and my father and his father, Jacob Chandler as well, all of them whispering words I couldn’t make out, verses from the Bible that seemed somehow to fit. Someone held my eyes closed, a heavy hand tight on my lids, but I managed them open, blinked at the light from the lamp next to the bed.

I tried to move my arms but couldn’t, the weight of our quilts now on me, pressing on my chest, my legs, my belly and I remembered I was here to bear a child still in me, the mound below me no smaller, no wails through the room of a child letting the world know it was here, ready to start in on the fight every life becomes. There was only me here, the door to the bedroom shut, behind it those whispers.

“Cathe ral, ” I called out, my voice far away from me, not even of me but mine for the name it called out.

The door opened, and Cathe ral, silhouetted by the light from the hall, moved toward me. Here was her hand on my head again, in my hair, that familiar comfort, and I closed my eyes.

She whispered, “Now, Miss Jewel, it near on to four o’clock in the morning, and you still not ready to have this baby be born.” She touched the backs of her cool fingers to my cheek. “So we been at this for too long now, and Mr. Leston and me, we both think you best be taken into the hospital now.”

I opened my eyes to her. “The hospital? ” I whispered. “What’s wrong here? ” Leston came into the room, at first silhouetted by the hall light, then lit with the lamp. It was as if he’d only been gone a mmoment, the hat was still in his hand, the brim moving round, and for an instant I wondered if those useless hands could possibly be the same hands I’d let fill me up with the same pleasures I’d known for so many years now.

Hands I’d given up to, only to be ushered into this moment, and the pain of bearing our next and last child.

He leaned close to me, Cathe ral moving away to give him room, and I could see that, though maybe they were the same hands, something else had changed in him, his eyes had become even older, fear dug into the lines below them, into the creases beside them, the green gone now to a color I couldn’t name for the trouble they seemed to see, and I knew this change signaled from God I was lined up to die, the birth of this child my own death.