Touched (5 page)

“I brought your gramophone home,” I told her.

She nodded but didn’t smile.

“Pecos took out after Mattie and sliced her hand open.”

Duncan turned to look at the open window. The bird was sitting there. It gave me a start because it hadn’t been there before. I’d looked straight at those pretty curtains and seen only the sun. The rooster had crept up there without making a sound.

“Pecos is sneaky,” JoHanna said, but there was fondness in her voice. “We used to let him sleep behind the stove in the kitchen, but he kept sneaking out and pecking me when I bent over to get something out of the oven.” She laughed, and Duncan smiled with her. “He’s always been bad, but he’d fight the devil to protect my baby.”

Pecos flapped off the sill and disappeared.

All the strange gossip about JoHanna and Duncan came back to me with a force that banded around my lungs. I was already dizzy from the smell of the turpentine and the heat. I put my hand on the iron rail of Duncan’s bed and braced.

“Will has to head out to Memphis today.” JoHanna spoke to Duncan, and there was no emotion in her voice.

“He’s leaving today?” I opened my mouth before I thought. I had to grip the bedstead to keep from putting my hand over my face. Why was I constantly talking before I thought? It was the one thing Jojo punished me for that I never resented.

“He left Natchez yesterday with a shipment of crystal sitting on the dock waiting for the train to Memphis. He’s responsible for it, and he wants to be sure it’s moved carefully to the warehouse.”

Memphis, Tennessee, was up at the top of Mississippi, but to me it was in a distant land. I’d seen pictures of women in elegant, sparkly dresses lounging in hotel lobbies beside men dressed in black—black suits and white shirts that made them look like dangerous characters from some Hollywood fantasy. Will stayed in those hotels. He went to the lobby and sat, the strange lights from the bar caught in the crystal glass he held.

JoHanna straightened the covers over Duncan’s legs. Her hand drifted upward, touching her daughter’s hand, then her cheek, then her hair. It made my chest ache.

“Tell me about your mama,” JoHanna said, her fingers still caressing Duncan’s ruined hair. “Tell us about your family.” She indicated a chair by Duncan’s bed while she took another. There was a book folded open on the nightstand.

What could I tell them? My mother had been born Lydia Belle Carter. When she was fourteen her father had run off and abandoned the family. At fifteen she was pregnant with me and accepting the proposal of John Kimball. Daddy worked for the BM&O railroad in Meridian as yard supervisor. We had a small house, and I had two sisters and a brother before Daddy got caught between two cars and crushed. Mama never told me, but I heard them talking, saying he’d been pinched nearly in two. From there it was a slow fall into deeper and deeper misery with the ultimate bad mistake coming in the form of Jojo Edwards and four more children.

“Mama can sing,” I finally answered her. “She used to sing a lot, but she doesn’t much anymore.”

Three

J
OHANNA loaded the wagon with potatoes that we dug from the rich brown dirt of her garden. She worked with an ear to Duncan’s window, but her hands explored the dirt as if it were familiar skin. She drew up clumps of green onions and carrots. From beneath thick, dark leaves she cut the yellow squash and the prickly okra. She talked of places I’d only read about, making them seem real and somehow attainable. When the wagon was full, she walked me to the road. With the sun still in my face, I walked home, plotting how I would come back.

It was three days later, on the Fourth of July, before I saw them again. I had hunted through the dry goods store to no avail in my search for material that looked anything like the curtains JoHanna had hung in Duncan’s room. I wanted the light that sifted through them, softer than the harsh July sun, light that was alive with its own color. But the store didn’t carry anything close. I could not explain what I wanted, so I let it go. I had my reason to go back to Peterson’s Lane and the McVay house. JoHanna could tell me where to get the curtain material. I would go as soon as the Independence Day party was over.

The two biggest churches of Jexville were both having dinner on the grounds to celebrate the day. It was a rivalry posed in the smiles of friendliness, but there were sharp overtones that spoke of status and loyalty. Each church competed to see which would have the finer and more elaborate feast, which would have more congregants in attendance.

The sun was hot, and the town still buzzed with the gossip of Duncan’s lightning strike. Elikah had gotten up at dawn to start his preparations with the pig pit they had been digging since the day before. I made jars of sweet tea and followed him to the churchyard. I had been put to cutting the chickens that Elikah and two other men were cooking over a huge fire pit. A whole pig was sizzling in the pit on the east side of the church, giving off a tantalizing odor if I didn’t look at it.

Ignoring the heat, a dozen children were running and screaming, checking the tables that gradually filled with cakes and pies and pickles and breads. Otto Kretzler, the man who built the railroad, had brought the pig to our church, and also one to the Baptist church, which stood catty-corner from us, close enough for the children to run back and forth, reporting on each new developing dish or bit of decoration.

Elikah had told me that Will McVay had left town the day after the lightning and had not returned. Elikah said Will wasn’t coming back, that JoHanna had finally driven him away. I knew better, but I didn’t say. It wasn’t just Elikah who said such things. It was the whole town.

I cut the chickens, the sweat rolling down my back and staining the navy of my dress a darker hue. My hair was hot, and I had pinned it up, trying to imitate the twist that JoHanna wore with such ease. Too fine and slightly curly, my own hair slipped from the pins to torment me by dangling down my neck and in my eyes. I knew the women watched me, thinking that a handsome man like Elikah could have done better than me. He had courted some of the girls who now stood in the shade of a big oak, fanning themselves with cardboard scenes from the local funeral home and laughing as they dipped their heads together. They wore pale-colored dresses with ribbons in their neat hair. Instead of cooking, they had been given the chore of sticking red, white, and blue bunting around the tables and pinning ribbons on the lapels of the men’s suits. I hated them, and myself.

I hated the chickens, their pale skin yellow with fat, and the ugly puckers where feathers had been. Looking down at a half-cut carcass, I thought of Pecos. My own hand was stiff and painful, and I had told Elikah that I cut it trying to carve a joint of beef. He’d looked at it, nodding when I told him I’d poured turpentine in it, and said that it would heal. He told me to be more careful, and later that night he’d poured more turpentine into it for good measure. It had hurt more the second time.

I severed a thigh and drumstick and stopped to wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. The bloody knife lifted in my raised arm, I heard the motor car. In that same instant, I saw JoHanna. She was wearing a big hat that cast a shadow all down her bosom, a straw hat with a cluster of red flowers in the front where the brim was pinned.

She was sitting in the front of the big red Auburn Touring Car with Will driving. Duncan was in the rear seat with Pecos riding on the back. They slowed for Duncan to look out at the scene. JoHanna pointed to me and smiled. Then they went on down Main Street, disappearing in a cloud of orange dust.

“They’re going to the doctor in Mobile,” Janelle Baxley said as she came over to me, her eye critically examining my dissection of the chickens. She pointed at a half, “Don’t leave it like that. Too thick to cook.”

“How do you know?” I stabbed with the knife, sinking the tip of the blade a good inch into the wooden table.

Janelle flinched, but she didn’t step back. “The men are too impatient. They won’t let a big piece cook.”

“How do you know they’re going to the doctor?” My sleeve was soaked with sweat, but I had nothing else to wipe my face on.

“Duncan hasn’t walked or talked since the lightning. Doc Westfall says she won’t.”

I didn’t believe Doc Westfall was making predictions, but I didn’t say so.

“There was brain damage,” she said, nodding wisely. “She’ll probably be like a big old cabbage the rest of her life.”

I’d seen Duncan’s eyes. They were distinctly un-cabbagelike.

“Agnes said the girl was dead.” Janelle dropped her voice to a whisper. “She said you were there, standing right beside her. Was she?”

“Yes.”

Janelle stepped closer. “Was she really dead? You know Agnes exaggerates so that I didn’t want to believe her. Was Duncan really dead?”

“Yes.” I couldn’t help it. My reward was the widening of her eyes, the flutter of her lids, as if she’d just been smote by the Holy Spirit or a really bad whiff of something rotten.

“My goodness.” She huffed a little in excitement. “So it’s true.”

There were still a dozen chickens to cut, and my hand was hurting. I looked at it and saw that the wound had reopened. Blood had soaked the bandage I’d tied around it. Janelle looked down and saw it, too, but she ignored it. In her new print dress she didn’t want any part of the bloody gore of cutting chickens.

“You know they say that not even the devil would have that child, so he sent her back.” She wasn’t smiling.

I drew the knife out of the wood, running my fingers along the blade in an absent gesture. “I heard it was God that sent her back.”

Janelle stepped away from me. “God?”

I nodded solemnly. “God.”

“Well, he wouldn’t have her either.”

“Not exactly. He gave her a chore to do.” Without warning I brought the knife down hard on the half chicken she’d been discussing. The blow cleaved it. I looked up from the chicken directly into her eyes. “Duncan is his chosen one.”

“I have to see to the tea.” Janelle hurried away, looking back once with her eyes wide.

By the time the table was finished and the food ready to eat, the heat and the blood of the chickens had made me sick. Elikah brought me a glass of tea under the shade of the oak. The other girls had gone off with their families or their beaus, and I had the strong support of the tree trunk and the cool shade all to myself.

“You need to go home,” Elikah said, looking at my ruined dress and my hair, at the blood on my hand. There was whiskey on his breath, and I knew that in the dawn hours when the pig roasting had begun, Tommy Ladnier had been by with his jars of clear liquor.

Liquor was the nectar of Satan, and Tommy Ladnier was the devil’s own spawn. But he had the finest clothes and the best car, and I’d heard in my short stay in Jexville three times about his house on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with a brick gallery that was terraced straight down to the waters of the Mississippi Sound. Each weekend negro musicians played their dark music and men and women danced, drunk on whiskey and moonlight and the promise of sex.

The way I heard it, Tommy Ladnier spent money by snapping his fingers and giving an order. Someone rushed to carry out his most outlandish whim. But Tommy worked six days a week delivering his goods. Personally delivering. The trademark of a fine salesman, Elikah always said. My husband, and most of the men of Jexville, were regular customers of Tommy Ladnier.

I gave Elikah back the unfinished glass of tea and started home, wanting nothing more than to strip my old dress off and throw it away. I wanted to take the scissors and cut the dress into bits so small that not even my mama could make it go back together again. And then I wanted to cut my hair. I wanted to hear the sharp tear of the blades beside my ear. It was a clean, crisp sound that declared independence. I’d been by the barbershop two or three times and stood in the doorway as Elikah relieved a customer of his troublesome locks.

“Screetch!” The hair would fall, revealing white scalp or a loppy ear. “Screetch!” And the neck would be revealed for the cool breeze.

My good hand itched for the weight of the scissors. It was a dangerous desire.

Instead, I took off my dress and put it to soak in a pan of water. Elikah had drawn up another pan, and I stood in the washtub and poured it over my head as slowly as I could. The water was heavy, and my arms trembled and made me spill some of it, but as it fell over me, my arms steadied.

When I got out, I dried. Elikah would not be home until much later. There would be singing in the afternoon, and bonfires as the night fell. I had heard all the plans, couched as they were in quiet disguise. While the children faded into sleep in the hot afternoon and the women began to clean up, the men would continue to drink. Late at night, when the bonfires had gone dead from lack of wood, the men would stumble home, where their wives and children already slept. It was the way that Elikah and many of the men had always celebrated the Fourth of July.

I rubbed myself with the delicious roughness of a towel dried stiff in the hot sun. Even though I worked harder, I was beginning to put on weight. There was more food in Elikah’s house and fewer mouths to feed. Clutched by my worst fear, I probed my belly. More than anything in the world I dreaded being pregnant. Pregnancy meant a lifetime of slavery. Pregnancy was the death of all hope. Pregnancy was the terror of a hungry child and no means to get food for it.

Stiff and frightened, I crept into bed and hid beneath the clean cotton sheets, my hair heavy and damp and still around my face and at last in a condition where I could like it, at least a little.

I dreamed of Pecos. At first he drove Will’s beautiful red car, his gobbles swinging crazily in the wind as he steered with the tips of his feathered wings. Then he was dancing in the bare yard of JoHanna’s house with the carcasses of the chickens I’d prepared to cook. Though they had no heads or feathers, they had feet and could dance the Charleston. It was a strange dream but not troubling, and I awoke to the stillness of late night and an empty bed.

I had never been alone a night in my entire life, and I stretched, finding a cooler place on Elikah’s side of the bed. A slight breeze came through the window I had left open, and I realized I was naked. Elikah would be scandalized. The thought pleased me, but I got up and put on one of his clean shirts that I had not yet ironed. He would never know that I’d worn it.

Barefoot, I went to the swing on the porch. The night was dark but the stars were very bright. I wasn’t certain, but I thought I could see the smoldering embers of the bonfire. Elikah would be home soon, and it would behoove me to be dressed in a gown and asleep in the bed when he returned. It was unseemly for a young bride to wear her husband’s shirt and nothing else on the front porch of her new home. But the cool night air on my bare thighs made me remember the strange freedom of my childhood. When Jojo wasn’t home, I often slipped out on the porch of the old house to dream and think. I slept in old shirts of my brothers, and because I was still a child, no one objected. It was a good memory.

As I started to sit down, my hand brushed the top of a strange object, a box, that had been left on the swing. It hadn’t been there when I came home and went to bed. It was a large box.