The Darkest Child (32 page)

I opened the folded paper. There were five twenty-dollar bills lying atop the name, address, and telephone number of his mother.

“This is goodbye?” I asked.

Crow shook his head.“When it’s goodbye, I’ll say goodbye.”

I got out of the car, and Crow leaned his head toward the passenger window.

“Yo’ mama really got the clap?” he asked.

“Time will tell,” I answered, although I didn’t think my mother had anything, except a bad case of lunacy, for if she did, I surely had it, too.

fifty - six

F
or weeks, I would get up during the night, peer out the front door, search the dark field for Crow’s car. It was never there, and I did not see him, but I continued to feel his presence. I had even been by the Tates’ house to ask if they had seen him. He had vanished without the promised goodbye. Through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, I kept waiting for Crow to pop up at our door and say, “Hey, sugar, you knew I wouldn’t forget about you.” But he never showed up.

Mama complained about not having any money, and several times I was tempted to give her the money I had stashed with Martha Jean for safekeeping, but I subdued the impulse. Sometimes the bugs would come back to annoy Mama, but she would drink corn whiskey and swat the bugs away.

One evening while Mama, Laura, and I were sitting in the kitchen, Mama asked, “How’s yo’ back, Tangy Mae?”

“It’s healing,” I answered.

“I had a little talk wit’ Chadlow ’bout what he done to you,” she said.“He wants to see you. He says he wants to apologize, and that he’s got something special for you.”

“I don’t want anything from him.”

“Just let the man apologize, Tangy Mae. That ain’t gon’ hurt nothing.”

I sat at the table, staring across at my mother. I had promised myself that I would mention Chadlow’s name to her only once more in my life. I sent Laura out of the kitchen because the time was now.

“Mama, you scraped the bottom of the barrel to find Chadlow,” I said calmly. “He doesn’t like your children, and I wonder if he even cares anything about you. He’s a mean man. One day he might hurt you the way he did me. I hate what you’ve made me do, and as soon as I’m old enough, I’m moving out of here.”

“Humph,” she grunted.“You ain’t moving nowhere, Tangy Mae. You too lazy to leave here.Who you think gon’ let you stay wit’ them when all you wanna do is go to school, go to school, go to school. But when you leave,
if
you leave, I’ll still have Laura, and I can always go back and get Edna.You say one more thing to me, and I’ll pull you outta that damn school tomorrow.”

“Do you love me, Mama?” I asked, did not wait for an answer, afraid to hear what she might say. “I love you. I get angry with you sometimes, but I’ve always loved you. I just don’t like what you’ve made me do.When I was younger, the children would tease me because I went to school smelling like pee.They don’t tease me anymore, but now I think they can smell the stench of that farmhouse all over my body. Behind our backs, people call us sluts, Mama.You, me, Tarabelle, and Mushy. Mr. Pace has changed, and Mr. Hewitt tolerates me only because he has to. At school, mostly everybody stays away from me. So pull me out if you want. I might quit and save you the trouble.”

My mother stared at me and snatched a bug from her nose. She worked her tongue across her bottom gum the way her mother used to do with snuff, then she said, “The way they treat you at that school, Tangy Mae, do it stop you from learning how to read, and write, and count up yo’ numbers?”

I shook my head and smiled.“No, Mama. It just makes me try harder to be the best student there.”

“Humph.” She grunted as she rose from her chair. “You know, I really miss Pearl.You oughta go up there tomorrow and tell her I’m sorry for hitting her. Did I hit her or did she hit me?”

Without waiting for an answer, she went off to her room, and left me sitting there thinking about Miss Pearl and wondering if she would forgive my mother, thinking about school and wondering if I should quit with less than four months left to go, thinking about Laura and Edna and wondering what their lives would be like after I left Pakersfield.

Laura returned to the kitchen and drew me away from my thoughts by announcing she was hungry.We decided on peanut butter and crackers, and although the evening was chilly, we took our snacks out to the front steps. Maybe twenty minutes after we were done licking peanut butter from our fingers, Mama came out of the house and moved down the steps past us.We watched her climb into her car and drive west toward the farmhouse.

A few seconds after Mama’s car was out of sight, I heard a rustle in the thickets on the road side of the gully.As I watched, a figure sprinted across the road and into the field of weeds. Had Laura not gripped my thigh in alarm, I might have thought the figure a figment of my imagination, it disappeared so fast.We rose from the steps and quietly hurried inside, barely escaping the lights that rippled through the weeds and glinted across the front of the house.

There was little I could do to ensure our safety, as the front door was weak and had no lock. I thought of dragging one of the armchairs to the door, but then I thought if someone was after us, they wouldn’t have gone into the field.They could have gotten us while we were sitting on the steps.

Laura was clinging to me, crying, and my heart was hammering so loud that I almost missed the sound of a car. I peered out the front door and saw the tail end of a black car heading west, the same way Mama had gone. I would have sworn it was Crow’s car if Crow, the liar, had not been long gone from Pakersfield. I tried to calm myself, realizing it was my anxiety that was causing Laura so much distress.

“There’s no one there, Laura,” I said, and opened the door wider so that she could look out.“Look! Whoever it was is gone now.”

It took a while to get her settled down enough to fall asleep, but she finally did, and I sat in an armchair to watch over her.No one had ever come to our house to cause us harm, and there was no reason to believe anybody would tonight. I kept reminding myself of that until I was able to think pleasant thoughts. I thought of Velman Cooper, and of what Crow had said to me. Crow was right.Velman would never belong to me, and I did not want to see Martha Jean unhappy.Why did I need Velman anyway? What had he ever done for me? Nothing, except stand up to my mother— and win. But he had won Martha Jean, and not me. I would stay away from Motten Street. I would forget about Velman Cooper if it killed me.

I felt myself leaving fear behind and heading toward self pity. I tried to shake it off, finally deciding to sleep it off.As I rose from the chair to change for bed, I heard a car on the road again. It passed our house and kept going.

Martha Jean was changing the bandages on my back only twice a week now, and I no longer asked Mushy to do it. I thought the bandages were unnecessary, but Martha Jean insisted I keep them on, and since I could not see what my back looked like, I decided to respect her opinion. I removed my blouse and checked the back of it for signs of blood or drainage before dousing the kerosene lamp.With my nightclothes on, I unrolled my blankets. But I had barely settled on the floor when I heard a crash outside that seemed to shake the foundation of the house. Laura awakened with a shudder, and I drew her to me to calm her down, then together we went to the porch to investigate.

My mother’s car had struck the embankment below the house. As we watched, the car shifted into reverse and the front end came free of the embankment and bounced several times as it settled on the dirt road. It stood idling for a second or two, then it veered to the left and accelerated. For a moment, it seemed to hang in midair before crashing into the field.

The car door opened, and a huge, white bird came flying out from the front seat. As it drew closer, I realized it was my mother. She was wrapped in a white sheet that fluttered in the wind as she half ran, half stumbled out of the field and across the road. The abandoned car idled nosily, and a wisp of its exhaust vapor was captured in the beam of red tail lights.

Hurriedly, I went into the house, lit the kerosene lamp, and returned to the porch. Mama had reached the yard. She was naked beneath the sheet and her feet were bare. She rushed up the steps and brushed past us, and I could hear a gurgling sound coming from her throat.There was blood on the sheet, a splatter of blood on her face and neck, and a lot on her chest.

“Mama, what happened?” I screamed, but she would not answer me.

She used the sheet to wipe at the blood on her chest. In the hallway, she turned in circles as though she had lost all sense of direction, then she lurched toward her room. Laura and I followed behind her. I drew close to examine her injuries. There was so much blood that it seemed her chest had been slashed open. Laura cried, and I held my hands to my ears to make it all go away.

Finally, my mother spoke with a humming, nasal sound, “Get the tub. Get the tub. Get the tub, Tangy Mae.”

Relieved, I snatched the flashlight from the kitchen shelf and raced outside for the tub. I took it inside, then rushed back to the yard for water. Out in the field, Mama’s car was still idling nosily, and I turned it off.When I returned to Mama’s room with the water, she was kneeling in the dry tub, rubbing at her chest with the palms of her hands. I dumped the entire bucket of cold water into the tub but Mama did not shiver. Laura gave me a cloth, and I began to gently wash away the blood from my mother’s chest. She did not struggle against me nor try to help me.When the blood was gone, I saw no injuries at all.

“What happened, Mama?” I asked again.

She would not speak, and when I tried to help her from the tub, she would not move. Exhausted from straining to lift her up, I sat on the floor beside the tub and tried to talk her out of the cold water. She would not budge, and finally, I got the basin and dipper, and began to scoop the water out.

Laura drifted off to sleep, leaving me alone to care for Mama. I fed the fire in the fireplace with bits of kindling and coal, covered Mama’s back with a blanket, then used the bloody sheet she had worn home to soak up as much water as I could from the bottom of the tub. Lastly, I brought hot coffee to her and held it to her lips. She managed two sips before clamping her mouth closed.

It was near daybreak when a siren breached the silence around us. I made it to the door in time to see the sheriff ’s car zoom past our house heading west, the direction from which Mama had come. I was frightened enough to rouse Laura and send her to get Miss Pearl.

“R
osie, you talk to me!” Miss Pearl demanded.“What’s wrong wit’ you? What’s done happened?”

It had taken Miss Pearl the longest time to reach Penyon Road because at first she had not thought there was any emergency. She had taken the time to feed Laura and Edna, and send them off to school. Laura had only told her that Mama would not get out of the tub. Miss Pearl had to question Laura at length before she understood that Mama had been in the tub all night, and that she had come home covered in blood.

“I almost didn’t come out here, Tangy Mae,” Miss Pearl said. “I ain’t even spoke to Rosie in more than a year.What in the world done happened?”

“I don’t know, Miss Pearl, but I sure am glad you came.”

“Well, let’s see can’t we get her outta this doggone tub. She gon’ catch her death of pneumonia as cold as it is in here.”

We gripped Mama beneath her arms and tried to pull her from the tub. She was stuck though, as if she had been cemented to the bottom. Each time we pulled, we lifted tub and all. Miss Pearl finally lubricated her hands with cooking lard and rubbed it on Mama’s knees, feet, and every part of the body she could reach within the confines of the tub, and when we tried again, Mama came loose.

We heaved her onto the bed, and she lay there hollow-eyed, stiff, and speechless.

For several minutes, Miss Pearl sat on the bed beside Mama and tried to coax her into telling us what had happened, but Mama was like a dead woman with wide open eyes, and her body remained rigid the whole while we worked to get a dress over her head and her arms into the sleeves.

“We gon’ have to get Doctor Mathis out here,” Miss Pearl said. “I don’t like the looks of this, Tangy Mae.”

I nodded, and went into the front room to get dressed. I had changed from gown to clothes, had my coat in my hand, and was in the hallway near the door when Mama spoke. Her voice had the quality of a frightened child just awakened from a nightmare.

“Pearl,” she whimpered.“Pearl, I knew you’d forgive me.”

“I’m here, Rosie. I need you to tell me what happened,” Miss Pearl said.

Still holding on to my coat, I eased back into my mother’s room. She was lying flat on the bed with her eyes open, just as she had been for the last hour or so, but now her right hand was groping the air for something unseen.

“Junior came,” she whispered.“You remember Junior, don’t you, Pearl? Junior Fess? He came in through the window and cut Chadlow’s throat.”

A frown creased Miss Pearl’s brow as she stared at Mama.“Rosie, Junior been dead for nearly three years now.”

Mama sobbed and her body twitched on the bed. “I know, Pearl. I know,” she said. “Chadlow killed him. Now Junior done come back and killed Chadlow. He came in through the window. I seen him.”

Miss Pearl glanced in my direction and rapidly waved a hand toward the door. I knew she wanted me to rush to get Dr.Mathis, but I was transfixed.

“Rosie, how you know Chadlow killed Junior?” Miss Pearl asked.

Mama seemed barely able to get the words out.“I was wit’ him when he done it,” she whispered. “He beat Junior wit’ a crowbar ’til Junior was all broke up in pieces on the ground, but he wadn’t dead. Chadlow coulda stopped. He coulda stopped, Pearl, but he wouldn’t. He made me help him hang Junior from that tree. I didn’t wanna do it, I swear I didn’t. Junior was begging me to help him. ‘Help me, Miss Rosie. Please, Miss Rosie, don’t let him kill me.’ But Chadlow had done made up his mind, and wadn’t nothing I could do.”

“Oh, my God!” Miss Pearl groaned, and stepped away from the bed.

Mama’s groping hand now reached toward the sound of her friend’s voice.“Don’t leave me, Pearl. It wadn’t my fault.”

Miss Pearl came over to where I had braced myself against the bedroom wall. “You know you can’t repeat a word of this, don’t you?” she asked.

With downcast eyes, I nodded. I couldn’t even look at the woman who had delivered me into the world. Miss Pearl held me tightly to her chest, and we both wept. Across the room, Mama never turned her head in our direction. She relaxed her hand, made a gurgling sound, then she lay still—perfectly still.