Paradise (6 page)

It was peaceful, but she wished Connie would return lest she start up again—imagining babies singing. Just as the length of the woman’s absence seemed much too long, Mavis heard a car crunching gravel. Then braking. A door slap.

“Hey, old lady.” A woman’s voice, light, loose.

Mavis turned and saw a dark-skinned woman, limber and moving quickly, mount the steps and halt when she didn’t see what she expected.

“Oh, excuse me.”

“That’s okay,” said Mavis. “She’s upstairs. Connie.”

“I see.”

Mavis thought the woman was looking very carefully at her clothes.

“Oh, lovely,” she said, coming to the table. “Just lovely.” She stuck her fingers into the bowl of pecans and gathered a few. Mavis expected her to eat some, but she let them fall back to the heap. “What’s Thanksgiving without pecan pie? Not a thing.”

Neither one of them heard the bare feet plopping, and since the swinging doors had no sound, Connie’s entrance was like an apparition.

“There you are!” The black woman opened her arms. Connie entered them for a long swaying hug. “I scared this girl to death. Never saw a stranger inside here before.”

“Our first,” said Connie. “Mavis Albright, this is Soane Morgan.”

“Hi, hon.”

“Morgan. Mrs. Morgan.”

Mavis’ face warmed, but she smiled anyway and said, “Sorry. Mrs. Morgan,” while taking note of the woman’s expensive oxford shoes, sheer stockings, wool cardigan and the cut of her dress: summer-weight crepe, pale blue with a white collar.

Soane opened a crocheted purse. “I brought some more,” she said, and held up a pair of aviator-style sunglasses.

“Good. I got one pair left.”

Soane glanced at Mavis. “She eats sunglasses.”

“Not me. This house eats them.” Fitting the stems behind her ears, Connie tested the dark lenses at the doorway. She turned her face directly to the sun and the “Hah!” she shouted was full of defiance.

“Somebody order shelled pecans, or is this your idea?”

“My idea.”

“Make a lot of pies.”

“Make more than pie.” Connie rinsed the sunglasses under the sink tap and peeled away the sticker.

“I don’t want to hear, so don’t tell me. I came for the you-know-what.”

Connie nodded. “Can you get this girl some gasoline for her automobile? Take her and bring her back?” She was drying and polishing the new glasses, checking for spots and lint from the towel.

“Where is your car?” asked Soane. There was wonder in her voice, as though she doubted anyone in thongs, wrinkled slacks and a child’s dirty sweatshirt could have a car.

“Route eighteen,” Mavis told her. “Took me hours to walk here, but in a car…”

Soane nodded. “Happy to. But I’ll have to get somebody else to drive you back. I would, but I’ve got too much to do. Both my boys due on furlough.” Proudly, she looked at Connie. “House’ll be full before I know it.” Then, “How’s Mother?”

“Can’t last.”

“You sure Demby or Middleton’s not a better idea?”

Connie slipped the aviator glasses into her apron pocket and headed for the pantry. “She wouldn’t draw but one breath in a hospital. The second one would be her last.”

The small pouch Connie placed on top of a basket of pecans could have been a grenade. Positioned on the seat of the Oldsmobile between Mavis and Soane Morgan, the cloth packet emanated tension. Soane kept touching it as though to remind herself that it was there. The easy talk in the kitchen had disappeared. Suddenly formal, Soane said very little, answered Mavis’ questions with the least information and asked none of her own.

“Connie’s nice, isn’t she?”

Soane looked at her. “Yes. She is.”

For twenty minutes they traveled, Soane cautious at every rise or turn of the road, however slight. She seemed to be on the lookout for something. They stopped at a one-pump gas station in the middle of nowhere and asked the man who limped to the window for five gallons to carry. There was an argument, peppered with long silences, about the five-gallon can. He wanted Mavis to pay for it; she said she would return it when she came back to fill her tank. He doubted it. Finally they settled for a two-dollar deposit. Soane and Mavis drove away, turned into another road, heading east for what seemed like an hour. Pointing toward a fancy wooden sign, Soane said, “Here we are.” The sign read
RUBY POP.
360 on top and
LODGE
16 at the bottom.

Mavis’ immediate impression of the little town was how still it was, as though no one lived there. Except for a feed store and a savings and loan bank, it had no recognizable business district. They drove down a wide street, past enormous lawns cut to dazzle in front of churches and pastel-colored houses. The air was scented. The trees young. Soane turned into a side street of flower gardens wider than the houses and snowed with butterflies.

The odor of the five-gallon can had been fierce in Soane’s car. But in the boy’s truck, propped between Mavis’ feet, it was indistinguishable from the others. The gluey, oily, metally combination might have made her retch if he had not done voluntarily what Mavis had been unable to ask of Soane Morgan: turn on the radio. The disc jockey announced the tunes as though they were made by his family or best friends: King Solomon, Brother Otis, Dinah baby, Ike and Tina girl, Sister Dakota, the Temps.

As they bounced along, Mavis, cheerful now, enjoyed the music and the shaved part in the boy’s hair. Although he was pleasanter than Soane, he didn’t have much more to say. They were several miles away from Ruby pop. 360 and listening to the seventh of
Jet
magazine’s top twenty when Mavis realized that, other than the gas station guy, she had not seen a single white.

“Any white people in your town?”

“Not to live, they ain’t. Come on business sometime.”

When they glimpsed the mansion in the distance on the way to the Cadillac, he asked, “What’s it like in there?”

“I only been in the kitchen,” Mavis answered.

“Two old women in that big of a place. Don’t seem right.”

The Cadillac was unmolested but so hot the boy licked his fingers before and after he unscrewed the gas cap. And he was nice enough to start the engine for her and tell her to leave the doors open for a while before she got in. Mavis did not have to struggle to get him to accept money—Soane had been horrified—and he drove off accompanying “Hey Jude” on his radio.

Behind the wheel, cooling in the air-conditioned air, Mavis regretted not having noticed the radio station’s number on the dashboard of the boy’s truck. She fiddled the dial uselessly as she drove the Cadillac back to Connie’s house. She parked, and the Cadillac, dark as bruised blood, stayed there for two years.

It was already sunset when the boy started the engine. Also she had forgotten to ask him for directions. Also she couldn’t remember where the gas station with her two-dollar deposit was and didn’t want to search for it in the dark. Also Connie had stuffed and roasted a chicken. But her decision to spend the night was mostly because of Mother.

The whiteness at the center was blinding. It took a moment for Mavis to see the shape articulated among the pillows and the bone-white sheets, and she might have remained sightless longer had not an authoritative voice said, “Don’t stare, child.”

Connie bent over the foot of the bed and reached under the sheet. With her right hand she raised Mother’s heels and with her left fluffed the pillows underneath them. Muttering “Toenails like razors,” she resettled the feet gently.

When her eyes grew accustomed to dark and light, Mavis saw a bed shape far too small for a sick woman—almost a child’s bed—and a variety of tables and chairs in the rim of black that surrounded it. Connie selected something from one of the tables and leaned into the light that ringed the patient. Mavis, following her movements, watched her apply Vaseline to lips in a face paler than the white cloth wrapped around the sick woman’s head.

“There must be something that tastes better than this,” said Mother, trailing the tip of her tongue over her oiled lips.

“Food,” said Connie. “How about some of that?”

“No.”

“Bit of chicken?”

“No. Who is this you brought in here? Why did you bring somebody in here?”

“I told you. Woman with a car need help.”

“That was yesterday.”

“No it wasn’t. This morning I told you.”

“Well, hours ago, then, but who invited her into my privacy? Who did that?”

“Guess. You, that’s who. Want your scalp massaged?”

“Not now. What is your name, child?”

Mavis whispered it from the dark she stood in.

“Step closer. I can’t see anything unless it’s right up on me. Like living in an eggshell.”

“Disregard her,” Connie told Mavis. “She sees everything in the universe.” Drawing a chair bedside, she sat down, took the woman’s hand and one by one stroked back the cuticles on each crooked finger.

Mavis moved closer, into the circle of light, resting her hand on the metal foot of the bed.

“Are you all right now? Is your automobile working?”

“Yes, m’am. It’s fine. Thank you.”

“Where are your children?”

Mavis could not speak.

“There used to be a lot of children here. This was a school once. A beautiful school. For girls. Indian girls.”

Mavis looked at Connie, but when she returned her glance, Mavis quickly lowered her eyes.

The woman in the bed laughed lightly. “It’s hard, isn’t it,” she said, “looking in those eyes. When I brought her here they were green as grass.”

“And yours was blue,” said Connie.

“Still are.”

“So you say.”

“What color, then?”

“Same as me—old-lady wash-out color.”

“Hand me a mirror, child.”

“Give her nothing.”

“I’m still in charge here.”

“Sure. Sure.”

All three watched the brown fingers gentling the white ones. The woman in the bed sighed. “Look at me. Can’t sit up by myself and arrogant to the end. God must be laughing His head off.”

“God don’t laugh and He don’t play.”

“Yes, well, you know all about Him, I’m sure. Next time you see Him, tell Him to let the girls in. They bunch around the door, but they don’t come in. I don’t mind in the daytime, but they worry my sleep at night. You’re feeding them properly? They’re always so hungry. There’s plenty, isn’t there? Not those frycake things they like but good hot food the winters are so bad we need coal a sin to burn trees on the prairie yesterday the snow sifted in under the door quaesumus, da propitius pacem in diebus nostris Sister Roberta is peeling the onions et a peccato simus semper liberi can’t you ab omni perturbatione securi…”

Connie folded Mother’s hands on the sheet and stood, signaling Mavis to follow her. She closed the door and they stepped into the hall.

“I thought she was your mother. I mean the way you talked, I thought she was your own mother.” They were descending the wide central stairs.

“She is my mother. Your mother too. Whose mother you?”

Mavis did not answer, partly because she couldn’t speak of it but also because she was trying to remember where, in a house with no electricity, the light in Mother’s room came from.

After the roast chicken supper, Connie showed Mavis to a large bedroom. From the four cots in it, she chose the one closest to the window, where she knelt looking out. Two milky moons, instead of the one hanging there, would have been just like Connie’s eyes. Beneath them a swept world. Unjudgmental. Tidy. Ample. Forever.

California, which way?

Maryland, which way?

Merle? Pearl?

The lion cub that ate her up that night had blue eyes instead of brown, and he did not have to hold her down this time. When he circled her shoulders with his left paw, she willingly let her head fall back, clearing the way to her throat. Nor did she fight herself out of the dream. The bite was juicy, but she slept through that as well as other things until the singing woke her.

Mavis Albright left the Convent off and on, but she always returned, so she was there in 1976.

On that July morning she had been aware for months of the sourness between the Convent and the town and she might have anticipated the truckload of men prowling the mist. But she was thinking of other things: tattooed sailors and children bathing in emerald water. And exhausted by the pleasures of the night before, she let herself drift in and out of sleep. An hour later, shooing pullets out of the schoolroom, she smelled cigar smoke and the merest trace of Aqua Velva.

GRACE

E
ither the pavement was burning or she had sapphires hidden in her shoes. K.D., who had never seen a woman mince or switch like that, believed it was the walk that caused all the trouble. Neither he nor his friends lounging at the Oven saw her step off the bus, but when it pulled away there she was—across the street from them in pants so tight, heels so high, earrings so large they forgot to laugh at her hair. She crossed Central Avenue toward them, taking tiny steps on towering block heels not seen since 1949.

She walked fast, as though tripping through red coals or else in pain from something stuck in the toes of her shoes. Something valuable, K.D. thought, otherwise she would have removed it.

He carried the equipment box through the dining room. Narrow panels of lace spilled from a basket on the side table. Aunt Soane worked thread like a prisoner: daily, methodically, for free, producing more lace than could ever be practical. Out back the garden skirting to the left was weed-free and nicely tilled. K.D. turned right toward the shed and entered. The collies were thrilled to see him. He had to straddle Good to keep her down. Her ears were soft in his fingers and he was steady with the camphor-soaked cotton. The ticks came away like coffee grounds. He put his palm under her jaw; she licked his chin. Ben, the other collie, head on paws, looked on. Life at Steward Morgan’s ranch loaded the dogs with mess. They needed a few days in Ruby under K.D.’s care twice a year. He took the bristle brush from the box. Dug deep in Good’s hair, brushing it smooth and singing, softly in a Motown falsetto, the song he’d made up for her when she was a puppy. “Hey good dog; stay good dog; old good dog; my good dog. Everybody needs a good good good dog. Everybody needs a good a good a good good dog.”

Good stretched her pleasure.

Just those concerned would be at the meeting tonight. Everybody, that is, except the one who started it all. His uncles Deek and Steward, Reverend Misner, Arnette’s father and brother. They would discuss the slapping but not the pregnancy and certainly not the girl with sapphires hidden in her shoes.

Suppose she hadn’t been there. Suppose her navel had not peeked over the waist of her jeans or her breasts had just hushed, hushed for a few seconds till they could figure out how to act—what attitude to strike. In public, without girls hanging around, they would have known. As a group they would have assumed the right tone immediately. But Arnette was there, whining, and so was Billie Delia.

K.D. and Arnette had separated themselves from the others. To talk. They stood near the dwarf oaks behind the picnic benches and tables for a conversation worse than he ever thought talking could be. What Arnette said was, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” What she meant was: I’m going to Langston in September and I don’t want to be pregnant or to abort or get married or feel bad by myself or face my family. He said, “Well, what are
you
going to do about it?” thinking: You cornered me at more socials than I can remember and when I finally agreed I didn’t have to take your drawers down you beat me to it so this ain’t my problem.

They had just begun to veil threats and unveil mutual dislike when the bus pulled away. All heads, all, turned. First because they had never seen a bus in the town—Ruby was not a stop on the way to someplace else. Second to see why it stopped at all. The vision that appeared when the bus drove away, standing on the road shoulder between the schoolhouse and Holy Redeemer, riveted the attention of everybody lounging at the Oven. She didn’t have on any lipstick but from one hundred and fifty feet, you could see her eyes. The silence that descended seemed permanent until Arnette broke it.

“If that’s the kind of tramp you want, hop to it, nigger.” K.D. looked from Arnette’s neat shirtwaist dress to the bangs across her forehead and then into her face—sullen, nagging, accusatory—and slapped it. The change in her expression well worth it.

Somebody said, “Ow!” but mostly his friends were assessing the screaming tits closing in on them. Arnette fled; Billie Delia too, but, like the good friend she was, looked back, to see them forcing themselves to look at the ground, the bright May sky or the length of their fingernails.

Good was finished. Her belly hair could stand a light clipping—its knots were otherwise impossible—but she was beautiful. K.D. started on Ben’s coat, rehearsing his line of defense to Arnette’s family. When he described the incident to his uncles they had frowned at the same time. And like a mirror image in gestures if not in looks, Steward spit fresh Blue Boy while Deek lit a cigar. However disgusted both were, K.D. knew they would not negotiate a solution that would endanger him or the future of Morgan money. His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason. And their family had not built two towns, fought white law, Colored Creek, bandits and bad weather, to see ranches and houses and a bank with mortgages on a feed store, a drugstore and a furniture store end up in Arnold Fleetwood’s pocket. Since the loose bones of his cousins had been buried two years ago, K.D., their hope and their despair, was the last male in a line that included a lieutenant governor, a state auditor and two mayors. His behavior, as always, required scrutiny and serious correction. Or would the uncles see it another way? Maybe Arnette’s baby would be a boy, a Morgan grandnephew. Would her father, Arnold, have any rights then that the Morgans had to respect?

Fondling Ben’s coat, picking burrs from the silky strands of hair, K.D. tried to think like his uncles—which was hard. So he stopped trying and slipped off into his dream of choice. Only this time it included Gigi and her screaming tits.

“Hi.” She cracked her gum like a professional. “Is this Ruby? Bus driver said this was it.”

“Yep. Yeah. Uh huh. Sure is.” The lounging boys spoke as one.

“Any motels around?”

They laughed at that and felt comfortable enough to ask her who she was looking for and from where she had come.

“Frisco,” she said. “And rhubarb pie. Got a light?”

The dream, then, would be in Frisco.

The Morgan men conceded nothing but were uneasy at the choice of meeting place. Reverend Misner had thought it best to serve protocol and go to Fleetwood rather than season the raw insult done to the family by making the aggrieved come to the house of the aggressor.

K.D., Deek and Steward had sat in the parsonage living room all nods and conciliatory grunts, but K.D. knew what his uncles were thinking. He watched Steward shift tobacco and hold the juice. So far the credit union Misner had formed was no-profit—small emergency loans to church members; no-penalty payback schedules. Like a piggy bank, Deek had said. But Steward said, Yeah for now. The reputation of the church Misner had left to come to Ruby floated behind him: covert meetings to stir folks up; confrontations with rather than end runs around white law. He obviously had hope for a state that had once decided to build a whole new law school to accommodate one student—a Negro girl—and protect segregation at the same time. He clearly took seriously the possibility of change in a state that had also built an open closet right next to a classroom for another Negro student to sit in by himself. That was in the forties, when K.D. was a nursing infant, before his mother, her brothers, his cousins, and all the rest left Haven. Now, some twenty years later, his uncles listened weekly to Misner’s sermons, but at the close of each of them they slid behind the steering wheel of their Oldsmobile and Impala and repeated the Old Fathers’ refrain: “Oklahoma is Indians, Negroes and God mixed. All the rest is fodder.” To their dismay, Reverend Misner often treated fodder like table food. A man like that could encourage strange behavior; side with a teenage girl; shift ground to Fleetwood. A man like that, willing to throw money away, could give customers ideas. Make them think there was a choice about interest rates.

Still, the Baptists were the largest congregation in town as well as the most powerful. So the Morgans sorted Reverend Misner’s opinions carefully to judge which were recommendations easily ignored and which were orders they ought to obey.

In two cars they drove barely three miles from Misner’s living room to Fleetwood’s house.

Somewhere in an Oklahoma city, June voices are doubled by the sunlit water of a swimming pool. K.D. was there once. He had ridden the Missouri, Kansas, Texas line with his uncles and waited outside on the curb while they talked business inside a red-brick building. Excited voices sounded near, and he went to see. Behind a chain-link fence bordered by wide seamless concrete he saw green water. He knows now it was average size, but then it filled his horizon. It seemed to him as though hundreds of white children were bobbing in it, their voices a cascade of the world’s purest happiness, a glee so sharply felt it had brought tears. Now, as the Oldsmobile U-turned at the Oven, where Gigi had popped her gum, K.D. felt again the yearning excitement of sparkly water and the June voices of swimmers. His uncles had not been pleased at having to search the city’s business district for him and chastised him on the train and later in the automobile all the way back to Ruby. Small price then, and small price now. The eruptions of “How the hell you get in these messes? You should be with people your own age. Why you want to lay with a Fleetwood anyhow? You see that boy’s children? Damn!”—all of them exploded without damage. Just as he had already seen the sparkly water, he had already seen Gigi. But unlike the swimming pool, this girl he would see again.

They parked bumper-to-bumper to the side of Fleetwood’s house. When they knocked on the door each man, except for Reverend Misner, began to breathe through his mouth as a way of narrowing the house odor of illness.

Arnold Fleetwood never wanted to sleep in a pup tent, on a pallet or a floor ever again. So he put four bedrooms in the spacious house he built on Central Avenue. Sleeping arrangements for himself, his wife and each of their two children left a guest room they were proud of. When his son, Jefferson, came back from Vietnam and took Sweetie, his bride, into his own bed, there was still the guest room. It would have become a nursery had they not needed it as a hospital ward for Jeff and Sweetie’s children. The way things turned out, Fleet now slept on a hideaway in the dining room.

The men sat on spotless upholstery waiting for Reverend Misner to finish seeing the women who were nowhere in sight. Both of the Mrs. Fleetwoods spent all their energy, time and affection on the four children still alive—so far. Fleet and Jeff, grateful for but infuriated by that devotion, turned their shame sideways. Being in their company, sitting near them, was hard. Conversation harder.

K.D. knew that Fleet owed his uncles money. And he knew that Jeff wanted very much to kill somebody. Since he couldn’t kill the Veterans Administration others just might have to do. Everybody was relieved when Misner came back down the stairs, smiling.

“Yes. Well.” Reverend Misner clasped his hands, gave them a little shake near his shoulder as though he’d already knocked the contestant out. “The ladies promise to bring us coffee and I believe they said rice pudding later. That’s the best reason I know of to get started.” He smiled again. He was very close to being too handsome for a preacher. Not just his face and head, but his body, extremely well made, called up admiring attention from practically everybody. A serious man, he took his obvious beauty as a brake on sloth—it forced him to deal carefully with his congregation, to take nothing for granted: not the adoration of the women or the envy of the men.

No one returned his smile concerning dessert. He pressed on.

“Let me lay out the situation as I know it. Correct me, you all, if I get it wrong or leave out something. My understanding is that K.D. here has done an injury, a serious injury, to Arnette. So right off we can say K.D. has a problem with his temper and an obligation—”

“Ain’t he a little old to have his temper raised toward a young girl?” Jefferson Fleetwood, seething in a low chair farthest from the lamplight, interrupted. “I don’t call that temper. I call it illegal.”

“Well, at that particular moment, he was way out of line.”

“Beg your pardon, Reverend. Arnette is fifteen.” Jeff looked steadily into K.D.’s eyes.

“That’s right,” said Fleet. “She ain’t been hit since she was two years old.”

“That may be the problem.” Steward, known for inflammatory speech, had been cautioned by Deek to keep his mouth shut and let him, the subtle one, do the talking. Now his words blew Jeff out of his chair.

“Don’t you come in my house dirt-mouthing my family!”

“Your house?” Steward looked from Jeff to Arnold Fleetwood.

“You heard me! Papa, I think we better call this meeting off before somebody gets hurt!”

“You right,” said Fleet. “This is my child we talking about. My child!”

Only Jeff was standing, but now Misner rose. “Gentlemen. Whoa!” He held up his hands and, towering over the seated men, put to good use his sermon-making voice. “We are men here; men of God. You going to put God’s work in the gutter?”

K.D. saw Steward struggling with the need to spit and stood up also. “Look here,” he said. “I’m sorry. I am. I’d take it back if I could.”

“Done is done, friends.” Misner lowered his hands.

K.D. continued. “I respect your daughter—”

“Since when?” Jeff asked him.

“I always respected her. From when she was that high.” K.D. leveled his hand around his waist. “Ask anybody. Ask her girlfriend, Billie Delia. Billie Delia will tell you that.”

The effect of the genius stroke was immediate. The Morgan uncles held in their smiles, while the Fleetwoods, father and son, bristled. Billie Delia was the fastest girl in town and speeding up by the second.

“This ain’t about no Billie Delia,” said Jeff. “This is about what you did to my baby sister.”

“Wait a minute,” said Misner. “Maybe we could get a better fix, K.D., if you could tell us why you did it. Why? What happened? Were you drinking? Did she aggravate you somehow?” He expected this forthright question to open up a space for honesty, where the men could stop playing bear and come to terms. The sudden quiet that followed surprised him. Steward and Deek both cleared their sinuses at the same time. Arnold Fleetwood stared at his shoes. Something, Misner guessed, was askew. In that awkward silence they could hear above their heads the light click of heels: the women pacing, servicing, fetching, feeding—whatever it took to save the children who could not save themselves.