Twisting Topeka (11 page)

“
There, there,
MotherSister,” the pastor cooed at her, patting her arm. She
thought she heard doubt in his tone.

She stiffened, stopped crying, and
snapped, “I know what I heard, Pastor!”

*****

Cora’s thoughts reeled as she
whimpered in the front seat of the man’s car. When she cried too
loudly the man responded with, “Shut it up!” In her mind, to be
taken by this stranger meant one thing. She, Merdel and Dettie must
have done something very wrong. Warnings from her mother and Meemaw
careened through her thoughts about what to do and what not to do
“‘round white folk.” It’d been drummed into them to be quick to
apologize to white people even if they had no idea what mistake
they’d made.

“
Even if you
know
,
for gospel
truth, you’ve done nothin’ wrong,” Meemaw emphasized, “say ‘I’m
sorry’ to white folk and say it
fast!
It’s 1964, Babies, and the
only thing you might be doing wrong is being colored.”

Each time Carlotta heard her mother
say “colored,” she inserted that she preferred the term “Negro” or
“African-American.”

Meemaw’s standard reply, ““Colored”
has suited me all these years and it’s still fine by
me.”

Trapped in the car, Cora knew whatever
wrong she and her siblings had been caught doing, she must’ve been
doing it the worst. She was the only one the man took. She thought
he was probably taking her to jail. He wore no uniform, but police
were the only people who could take children.

Simon says, Go to
jail.

“
I-I’m s-s-sorry,
M-M-Mister,” she whimpered, huddled against the car door. “I’m very
s-s-sorry. My brother and my sister and me didn’t know we
shouldn’t—” she struggled. She could think of nothing they were
doing that was remotely wrong. The man’s face bore little
expression and he scarcely looked at her. A bad odor wafted from
him.

“
Quiet, doll. I’m not gonna
hurt ya,” he said, “I’m just gonna take ya for a ride. Ya like to
go for rides?”

Cora tried to make her head shake “no”
but it wouldn’t obey. Restrained sobs convulsed in her body. They
made it hard for her to control any part of it. Terrified, she’d
wet herself when he forced her into the car.

“
Everything is gonna be
just fine, okay doll?” He lit a cigarette. “Say, how ‘bout I buy ya
some candy? Some Pixie Sticks or Lemonheads? Hey, ya like little
Tootsie Rolls? I’ll buy you a can full of them if you stay quiet.”
He held her tight against her seat with his right arm while he
steered with his left.

She managed, “I d-don’t want
c-c-c-candy, s-s-sir.” Tears and snot dripped onto the shirt
covering the arm restraining her. She added, when she remembered,
“Th-Thank you.”

He glanced at her, then frowned at his
wet sleeve. The corner of his mouth twitched. A smile? Not like one
Cora had ever seen. His mouth moved, but the rest of his face
didn’t budge.

“
Aw come on, even little
colored kids like candy, don’t they?”

Cora knew she was never to
lie--to
bear false witness as she learned
in Sunday School. She’d recited the Commandments in church on a
recent Sunday. Meemaw rewarded her afterwards with a pack of Juicy
Fruit gum and an extra-long hug. Cora thought of grandmother’s hugs
as she rode in the man’s car. Meemaw always smelled of Avon
Vita-Moist Cream. Cora loved to bury her face in the fragrant
bosoms. After a deep inhalation, she would announce, “You smell
just like Heaven, Meemaw!”

Her grandmother would respond smiling,
“And how would you know how Heaven smells, Babygirl?”

Cora would usually shrug and smile.
But the last time, Cora had looked up into her grandmother’s face,
solemn. “I will know what Heaven smells like someday Meemaw, won’t
I?”

Her question had elicited a tight hug,
“Yes, you will,” Meemaw had assured her, “if you get those
commandments learned right.”

Cora had spent the rest of that week
memorizing and, the following Sunday, she stood before the
congregation to recite. The first five commandments came easily.
With the sixth, nerves and the sight of her giggling siblings, made
her stumble.

“
Thou shalt not…” She
looked out at Meemaw who shot a warning glare at Merdel and Dettie.
She looked back at Cora, smiled and mouthed “kill.” Cora relaxed
her tiny shoulders and spoke the fifth commandment and then six
through ten with confidence. She grinned when she finished, certain
her place in Heaven was secured.

Cora loved sweets, but she managed to
shake her head “No” to the man’s question about candy. All she
wanted was to go home. She hoped Meemaw and Jesus would forgive her
for lying.

The man blew cigarette smoke out of
the side of his mouth closest to her. They’d driven a long time. It
was dusk. He stopped the car near a field and turned it off. He
stubbed his cigarette.

“
Don’t you move.” He kept
his face straight ahead and got out of the car.

Cora heard him open and close the
trunk. He walked to her side of the car and opened the door. He
carried her into the middle of the field and laid her on the
ground. Cora felt ashamed that he now knew she was wet. She caught
sight of the object in his hand. An axe handle. Meemaw had one
under her bed “‘case someone is fool enough to break in here to do
harm.”

Cora lay still without being told. She
watched the man. He stood over her and looked her in the eyes. He
bent over to place one hand flat across her chest. Sweat from his
face dropped onto her. Cora hated that sweat being on her more than
the pee. He brought the axe handle down with a grunt. Cora
reflexively tried to roll away. She didn’t make a sound as the
handle impacted her head and her skull collapsed like porcelain. As
mercy would have it, she only felt that first of the multiple
blows. The man who was bludgeoning her had driven the roads of her
town.

“
I’m looking for a colored
doll,” was what he told a man at a liquor store. He had found
one.

Simon says pretend your
hands are teacups.

Cora’s hands twitched and her last
thought was about the tea party she had the day before. Merdel
balked at playing and Dettie drank the pretend tea before the
pretend cookies finished baking. That made Cora mad and she had a
strong urge to pinch her baby sister. She resisted because
intentionally hurting someone was high on Meemaw’s list of
punishable offenses.

*****

After that final, fractured memory of
her siblings, Cora only felt peace—like she was encased in velvet.
She felt herself rise, quickly at first. When above the man’s
reach, she hovered there. She felt light—as if air had replaced the
marrow in her bones. She’d felt a similar feeling at the county
fair a few months before. She’d stood on The Wheel of Certain
Death. It was a circular carnival ride whose floor, by design,
dropped out as it spun fast. Riders were held in an upright
position by centrifugal force as they rode pressed against the
walls. The children around Cora screamed and cried when the floor
dropped away, even much older ones. Not Cora, she loved the
sensation. She laughed the duration of the ride until her stomach
was sore. She would have ridden it again had she not run out of
money. She’d started saving pennies she found in hopes of making it
to the next year’s fair. In the air above the man, she had
experienced that ride’s exhilaration again—only magnified. She
giggled full out. The levity she felt unhinged all the places where
confusion and terror had been anchored earlier in the
day.

She became aware of pressure at two
places in her back. It was not painful, but distinct enough to make
her turn her head over each shoulder to look. She saw peaks
protruding from the skin on her back. Two feathered appendages
emerged. Her eyes widened, and she gasped in delighted recognition.
Wings! They were the same mint green as her best Sunday dress. She
flexed her shoulders and watched the expanse of each wing broaden
and slowly flutter. More giggling. She rose higher and looked down
to see the clothes on the body on the ground were splattered an
irregular red. She stared, feeling no connection to the body below,
even as the man completed his horror, dropped the axe handle, and
drove from the field.

Cora flew back to Meemaw’s house. The
road in front was full of cars. Some she recognized as belonging to
family or church folks. There were two sheriff’s cars, their lights
flashing. She scrunched her face at the sight of them. It was
taking a lot of people to decide her punishment for whatever she’d
done wrong. The people entering and exiting the house looked very
serious. She decided the sky was a good place to be for a while.
She hoped they’d soon miss her enough to forget what her wrongdoing
had been.

She decided to fly over favorite
places: her school playground, the library, her best friend Mae
Anne’s house. She saved one place for last--the woods behind
Meemaw’s house. Her most beloved haunt, it would become a new home
for her.

A week later, she flew back to the
field where the man had murdered her. Sheriffs were there searching
for her body. She fluttered happily around the grim men, eager to
show them that the body was no longer hers. But, despite the warm
wind she swept toward their faces with her aerial acrobatics, those
men left that field sadder than they came.

At her long funeral service, she flew
from one family member to another. No longer having any
understanding of sadness, she cocked her head at their weeping.
Merdel and Dettie, usually in competition for the squirmyest, were
strangely still. Cora hovered above the chancel when they began to
roll out the closed wooden box with a spray of pink carnations atop
it. She’d heard someone say it would be taken to the cemetery. What
Cora recalled most about cemeteries was their lack of playgrounds.
She opted to return to her woods.

The killer was soon caught. Meemaw
attended every day of his trial sitting in the section allotted for
coloreds. Carlotta fervently prayed he would be hanged. Not Meemaw.
She didn’t want death for him, she wanted his sentence to be a long
life of having to live with himself and what he had
done.

“
That will be worse than
any prison sentence or death,” she told everyone who would listen.
She didn’t believe what he testified—that he didn’t recall anything
about kidnapping and killing Cora. She stared at him and caught his
eye one day as he looked up while being led from court. She saw
that he remembered everything before he quickly looked away from
her.

He did remember Cora— every day of the
rest of his life. Memories of what he’d done to her made him pray
to die. He dreamt of death countless times; but in every dream, the
Grim Reaper was turned back by a small brown girl.

Simon Says don’t forget
me.

He lived to be
ninety-seven.

*****

On the summer morning that he was
buried, the sky was as only a Kansas sky could be. Cora, still
seven, reveled in the blue. Meemaw was with her now. They spent
their days in airborne adventures. As it suited them, they would
head back to their Heaven. The air was soft there and smelled of a
grandmother’s embrace.

Underground Ark

Reaona
Hemmingway

May 2013

The door to the old bomb shelter
groaned as seventeen-year-old Ken Crawford heaved it open. After
listening to Grandpa Willard talk about how Great-Grandpa Ellis
conducted air raid drills back in the 1950s, he had searched and
found the abandoned bunker on the family ranch in the Flint Hills
west of Topeka, Kansas. Flashlight in hand, he peered into the
depths of the concrete manhole. A switch near the ladder turned on
a series of lights that seemed to descend into the ground
forever.

“
Cool! It’s hooked up to
the grid.”

“
Let me see.” His
girlfriend, Alicia, shoved in next to him. “Ew! I couldn’t live in
such a dark, cramped place?”

“
You could, if your life
depended on it.” He handed her the flashlight and swung his legs
into the hole. “With the way Iran and North Korea keep messing
around with nukes, we might need to use this thing someday. You
should come down with me and check it out.”

“
No, I’ll stay here in case
you yell for help.”

The ladder descended seventy feet
before he reached bottom. The entry chamber contained clothes racks
filled with military-style chemical and radiation protection suits.
Helmets, gloves, and boots lay on shelves. The whole room was set
up for decontamination after returning from the outside. He opened
an airtight door that led into a shower room. In the next chamber
he found clothes closets.

The final portal led to living
quarters furnished in the mid-century modern style popular when
Great-Grandpa Ellis built the bomb shelter. The main living area
offered kitchen, dining, and lounging space. Three doors on the far
wall led to bedrooms. He opened a door on the other end of the
kitchen.

“
Whoa!”

Ken stared at shelving racks laden
with supplies from fifty years ago; all left behind after
Great-Grandpa Ellis died in 1964. Bookshelves contained manuals on
building construction, farming, and every topic needed to survive
and rebuild a community after a disaster.