The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (25 page)

“How else will they know to mind their manners?” Evelyn replied.

“I don’t want no police in here,” he said.

“Won’t be, if folks act right.”

The first time Walter came to the bar Bell introduced him to Evelyn, and they spent the evening eyeing each other like feral cats. He played pool with one of the customers and lost twenty-five dollars. After the game he asked the man to go into the alley with him to smoke a joint. He came back alone fifteen minutes later, tucking money into his pockets, his knuckles bruised. Evelyn turned to Bell after he left and said, “You need to learn to use my knife if you gon’ take up with niggers like that.”

One evening Bell was out behind the Belmore having a coughing fit when Evelyn stepped out for a breath of air. “That don’t sound like nothing for Robitussin,” she said.

Bell still had some cough syrup. It didn’t help the cough but it made her sleep. The bottle had rolled under the bed. My God, what wasn’t under there: remnants of peanut butter sandwiches, dust bunnies the size of her fist, dead roaches. They would find her body on dirty sheets with all of that nastiness under the bed. She ought to die on crisp white sheets with some soup in her belly. Just a push with her hands and she’d be standing, nothing could be easier. She took a deep breath and a coughing fit came over her. Her eyes teared. She forgot that she couldn’t take deep breaths anymore. Those restless moths would get her. She looked out of the window and tried to ease her breathing. She thought she saw Evelyn’s car at the intersection at the corner. Evelyn to the rescue, like a Saint Bernard. Ha! As though Bell were trapped on a mountain and waiting for rescue. She wasn’t trapped; she’d made a choice. Bell waved at that car on the street below.

ON AN AFTERNOON
in early summer, months before Walter left, Evelyn took Bell to see a friend of hers that would give her something for the cough. She steered her car down North 19th and turned onto Morse. Bell looked out of the window at the men standing in little knots at curbside. They watched Evelyn’s car glide by, sharp eyed as a pack of lions chasing a gazelle. One young man walked in front of the car. When Evelyn hit the brakes, he put his hands on the hood and bent low to peer inside. Bell gasped. He saw that it was two women and sauntered off toward the curb.

Evelyn said her friend lived at the end of the block. They approached what looked like a cul-de-sac. Bell glanced at Evelyn and realized that she had never seen her in the full light of day. The Belmore was sunk in a perpetual twilight; opaque window glass kept it dim even in the daylight hours. Evelyn had something of the Belmore’s waxy gray film—too much cigarette smoke and not enough sunlight—but she had high cheekbones and her hair was picked out into a short Afro that shimmered in the sunlight. She wore a man’s wide-collar shirt, fitted bell-bottom pants, and lace-up shoes that were double knotted. Bell liked that Evelyn knotted herself up so she wouldn’t trip and lose her balance. She couldn’t imagine her as anything less than sure-footed. And the way she drove, easy and confident, one hand on the steering wheel and the other arm slung along the top of the seat. Bell leaned back so her head just touched Evelyn’s forearm, and Evelyn shifted so that her fingers just grazed the top of Bell’s shoulder.

At the end of the block the crowd disappeared. There wasn’t a single loiterer in front of the last house, as though an invisible barrier held the people back. The steps and sidewalk were swept clean and flowerpots sat on either side of the door. They climbed the steps, and Evelyn tapped lightly with the door knocker. An old woman answered.

“This is the friend I told you about,” Evelyn said.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” Bell said.

She knew she sounded too proper. Evelyn glanced at her. At the bar Bell lowered her voice half an octave and coarsened her diction. She told herself that her affectation made her coworkers and customers feel more comfortable around her, but she really did it so she wouldn’t feel like a tourist among them and because she thought herself better than they were, and she assumed they agreed. Her feigned accent made her feel generous—like a queen stepping down from the throne to kiss a poor woman’s cheek. Now she was embarrassed, Evelyn had caught her in her lie.

The old woman’s house was cool and dim and smelled of piecrust and soil. Evelyn and Bell followed her down a corridor to the kitchen at the back of the house.

“Oh ma’am, isn’t it nice back here!” Bell said, looking at the butter-yellow walls and lace curtains and the light coming in as though the sun were lemonade pouring from a pitcher. Three places were set at the table, and there was a pie next to a jug of iced tea.

“Folks think it must be a cave in here on account of I keep the front room so cool,” she said and let out a low laugh that bubbled up from her belly. She rummaged for something in a drawer.

She must be a hundred years old, Bell thought. She was deep brown and had white hair cut close to the scalp.

She squinted at Bell.

“What’s this gal’s name again?” she asked Evelyn. “What’s your name, gal?”

“Bell, ma’am.”

“Bell.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Who’s your people?”

“My last name is Shepherd.”

“I knew it! I don’t never mistake a resemblance. You Hattie’s child, from round Wayne Street,” she said.

She looked at Bell again, appraising her clothes and shoes and hair. She looked into her eyes so long it made Bell uncomfortable.

“What you doing with yourself, gal?”

“I don’t know what you mean, ma’am,” Bell replied.

“Firstly my name is Willie. I cain’t stand nobody calling me ma’am. Second, you know what I mean. You work with Evelyn at that ol’ crazy bar?”

“Yes, ma’am. Willie.”

“When’s the last time you saw your mama?”

“I don’t …”

“I lay odds it’s been a minute.”

Willie had exposed her. Bell was grateful that Evelyn was gracious enough to keep her eyes on her pie plate. What would Walter do in a situation like this? Overturn the table, probably, and shout obscenities at the old woman. Bell rose from her seat.

“Thank you, ma’am, for your hospitality but I think I’d better be on my way,” she said.

“Oh, sit down, gal!”

Bell felt a pulling in her chest. She coughed long and hard. Evelyn turned to Willie and said, “That’s what I was telling you about.”

“You better sit down,” Willie repeated.

The coughing fit weakened Bell; she didn’t have the energy to leave. Willie’s kitchen made Bell miss her mother, though the kitchen at Wayne Street was drab white and Hattie ran it like an army mess. It had never been a place to sit in the sun and sip lemonade. That wasn’t her mother’s fault, but Bell was angry about it just the same—she had always found in Hattie a place to put the blame. Willie pushed a glass of tea across the table.

“How long you had that cough?”

“Oh, it comes and goes,” Bell answered.

“Sound like it’s mostly coming,” Willie said. “The Belmore ain’t no place for somebody got TB.”

“I don’t have TB! People don’t even get that anymore. It’s just a cough.”

“You been to the doctor?”

“No.”

“Where you live?”

“Dauphin Street.”

“Long way from home.”

“It’s only half an hour on the twenty-three trolley.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m alright where I am.”

“Don’t look like it, but ain’t nothing nobody can do about that but you,” Willie said. She sighed. “I was there at half your kin’s birthing. I guess you don’t remember. You was just a little thing when I left Wayne Street. I remember the last boy your mama had, bigheaded thing. Seem like he wanted to bring half your mama’s insides with her when he came out, for a souvenir.” She chuckled. “Hattie was alright in the end. Your mama was strong as a plow horse. I don’t usually find the high yellows to be so.”

Willie leaned forward and peered at Bell.

“You ain’t strong like she is. You got a soul that cain’t be still. Your mama did too at one time, but she wrestled it down. Yours look like it’s running you.”

Bell pressed a napkin to the sweat beading on her forehead and upper lip.

“You come on with me,” Willie said.

Bell followed her through a door at the back of the kitchen and down a short corridor with a creaky wooden floor. The smell of the outdoors intensified, not the city’s outdoor scent of tired trees and hot asphalt, but a clean roots and rain smell. Willie opened another door, and Bell stepped over the threshold onto something dense and springy. High windows on three of the four walls faced the backs of other row houses across an alley. The room was bright and hot, the floor layered with pine needles. Earthenware pots, some no wider around than a fist and others so big Bell could have climbed inside, sat on the floor. In the middle of the room a picnic table was covered with multicolored bottles and droppers and thin glass stirrers, stone mortars and pestles, vials of liquids of various shades of brown, drying plants hanging upside down from a small wire rack, and jars brimming with powders. Willie dragged a folding chair from the corner and opened it next to a wooden bench. Bell didn’t move.

“I expect you done enough standing around with your mouth open,” Willie said.

Long green tendrils drooped over the sides of planters suspended on hooks from the ceiling so it seemed that the room was hung with tattered green curtains. Bell half expected a flock of hummingbirds to rise from one of the pots and hover over her head.

“Most of what’s wrong with people today is that they ain’t got no place to go that makes them feel peaceful. I don’t reckon you got no place like that.”

“No ma’am, I don’t,” Bell answered.

“I know I couldn’t live without the smell of pine needles.”

Bell nodded and sat in the folding chair. Willie asked her again how long she’d had the cough and whether it was worse at night and if she had the sweats and how she’d been sleeping. She asked her if her dreams had changed since she got sick and what they had been like before that. Did Bell dream about blood, Willie asked, or crossing dry riverbeds? While she listened to Bell’s answers, Willie’s hands moved among the vials and bottles. She placed a few in front of her and asked a question. Depending on Bell’s answers, she poured something into a mixing bowl or whisked the bottle away and replaced it with another.

“What’s that?” Bell said, pointing at a green husk in a jar.

“Praying mantis. Don’t worry, you don’t get none of that.”

“What’s it for?”

“Lots of things. Could be to get a man you want but don’t want to keep for long. Could be for getting rid of one that won’t go away. Mostly it’s for show. Folks like to see something strange when they come in here.”

Willie crushed the materials in the mixing bowl into a powder. She poured in a clear liquid and made a syrup.

“What’s that?” Bell asked.

“Water.”

Willie funneled the mixture into a brown glass bottle.

“Make sure you have something on your stomach when you take this. No cow’s milk or cheese and nothing cold ’sides a little fruit. Just hot things, spicy if you can.”

She handed Bell the bottle, “Nastiest stuff you ever gon’ drink. Two tablespoons in a cup of hot water. Hold your nose and drink down three cups every day.”

She got up from the table and walked out of the room. Bell followed her, blinking to readjust her eyes in the dim hallway.

“Y’all done?” Evelyn asked when they walked into the kitchen.

“Much as can be, I reckon,” Willie answered. She turned to Bell, “Pride done brought down a lot of folks. One of these days you gon’ have to turn around and look at whatever it is you running from.”

Evelyn pushed some money into Willie’s hand, but the old woman refused it. Then they were out the door and in the car maneuvering through the crowd on Taylor Street. After Evelyn dropped her off, Bell sat on the steps of her building for a long time before throwing away the bottle Willie gave her. Upstairs in the apartment Walter was rolling joints and listening to the stereo at a volume that made Bell’s teeth rattle. She went to the bedroom and lay on the bed with Stevie Wonder’s tenor in her ears. She fell asleep and woke up to darkness and quiet. Bell never returned to work at the Belmore.

PURPLE AND ORANGE STRIPES
appeared on the horizon above the buildings on the other side of Dauphin Street. Bell’s hunger had passed, and her arms were stiff from tensing and relaxing her muscles in the afternoon’s efforts to rise from her bed. She wouldn’t get her soup; she was too weak to stand. Another night was coming, and she would cough and dream of her moths and maybe she would wake up the next morning and maybe she wouldn’t. She was too tired to go to the bathroom to fill the water jug she kept by the bed.

Walter, you coward, Bell thought. You liar. What a scene you made, kicking the wall and yelling about how you weren’t going to take care of me like some white woman in the suburbs. “This ain’t
Leave It to fucking Beaver,
” you said. “If you ain’t going to get another job, I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay the bills while you lay around all day.” Oh, it was a fantastic show. He’d overturned a chair and shoved her onto the floor and raised his fist as though he were going to bring it down on her jaw. And all because he couldn’t admit that he was scared he’d catch her TB or scared that he’d already caught it. Isn’t that something—tomorrow-be-damned Walter had an instinct for self-preservation after all.