Under a Dark Summer Sky (2 page)

As she hurried home, Missy's heart thumped crazily, like a moth trapped in a glass. Her feet sped along the familiar road, shoes whitened by the dust of crushed clamshells. To have come so close to losing Nathan… Were it not for Selma's quick action, the boy would now be tucked under the water somewhere, awaiting the gator's pleasure. The very thought of his blond curls stirred by the current, his blue eyes empty and sightless, the gator's jaws open for the first bite…
Oh, dear Lord.
Sweating hard, she forced her steps to slow. One deep breath, then another, then another. “Breathing and praying,” Mama always said. “The only two things you got to do every day.”

The pounding in her chest began to ease. Nathan was safe. There was no need for the Kincaids ever to know about the incident. All thanks to Selma…and someone else. She stopped for a moment to say a thank-you to the sky.

Hard to believe that the huge pile of bloody meat would soon be cleaned up and gone, but Missy had no reason to doubt Selma's word. It seemed all of her extended family had answered the call to help with the carcass.

Missy had prepared to help too, but Selma had said, “You go home, make yourself pretty for the barbecue. I take care of Nathan till Mrs. Kincaid get home.” The baby bounced happily on her hip, all cleaned up, his favorite wooden elephant in his mouth.

Missy had picked a speck of gore from his hair, on his miraculously unharmed head. “Well, okay, then. Thank you. See y'all at the beach.”

The Fourth of July barbecue and fireworks display was the high point in Heron Key's social calendar, the only one at which coloreds were allowed—on their own side of the beach, of course, but no one could partition the sky when those fireworks went up. Most years, she had missed it because of work. This year would be different because Mama was going to watch Nathan for her.

Just as she turned to leave, Missy had heard something that froze her feet to the bloody grass. It was Selma, calling, “Henry Roberts, you think just 'cause you been to Paree that you too good for this work? Get your scrawny ass down here and help.” Henry had given his sister a wry salute, stubbed out his cigarette, and joined the others to swing his machete over the carcass.

So
he
really
was
back.
Selma had gotten the news only a week ago, since which time Missy had lived in a state of feverish anticipation. He did not seem to recognize her, for which she was grateful, looking as she did like someone who had been through a wringer. Heart thudding, she studied him with sideways glances, at once desperate to be somewhere else but unable to turn her eyes away. He looked so different, no longer the young man she had seen off to war all those years ago. He was thin, ribs clearly visible through the open front of his sweat-stained shirt. Gray stubble marked cheeks no longer smooth. He took a dirty rag from his pocket and wiped his neck. There was a long, curved scar there, like a great big question mark. He looked, she thought, just like the millions of hopeless souls lined up at the soup kitchens in the North, seen in the newspapers that Mr. Kincaid threw out.

So, she thought, the war's been over for seventeen years and he never saw fit to come home until Uncle Sam sent him and a load of other dirty, hungry soldiers to build that bridge to replace the ferry crossing to Fremont. If this was supposed to make the veterans feel better about having to wait for the bonus they had been promised by the government, she figured the plan was less than a complete success. It sounded like there was a lot more drinking and fighting than bridge building going on at the camp.

Since hearing he was back, she had both dreaded and hoped for a chance meeting. In her daydreams, they met at church or maybe in town. She would be wearing the yellow dress with the daisies, and a white hat and gloves. She would be poised, head high, and would walk past without noticing him. He would be in his uniform, like he was when he left, shoes polished to a high shine, sharp creases in his pants. He would tip his hat to her, then do a double take and say, “This beautiful woman cain't be Missy Douglas. She was just a child when I left. Ma'am, may I escort you home?”

“Is that little Missy Douglas?” His voice had startled her out of the memory, that voice she had longed to hear for eighteen years but had thought never to hear again. He wiped the blood from his machete and hooked it to his belt. Sweat darkened his collar. He passed a dirty rag over his forehead. For a moment, she had wished the gator had taken her down. Blood caked her face, her hair. Even her shoes squelched with it. “I should've known,” he had said with a slow smile, “you'd be mixed up in this somehow. You bite that gator's head off all by yourself?”

Her mouth had opened and closed uselessly. She could not think of one single thing to say, still caught up in the daydream she had nurtured for eighteen years. All that time, while he was away, she had prayed and wished and cajoled God and the angels and the apostles and the universe to bring him back to her, and now here he was.

She narrowed her eyes against the glare off the road. Her steps quickened again. It was going to take some time to get clean of all traces of the gator. Henry was back, yes, but what else? Changed? Most certainly. Broken? Very possibly. She had heard the stories, of how the veterans needed to be drunk to sleep, how their hands shook so badly sometimes that they could not hold their tools, how any loud noise could provoke either tears or vicious violence.
Just
how
badly
damaged
is
he?
Her need to know was perfectly balanced by her fear of knowing.

But then, she realized, everyone had changed, including her. Nothing stayed the same, not after so many years. What would he think of her? Of what she had become—or, more importantly, not become? Still living with Mama, doing for the Kincaids, never been anywhere or done anything of note. Taking an encyclopedia to bed every night.

He had stood there, waiting for her reply. That same smile, in a much older man's face. And then, to her everlasting shame, she had fled.

• • •

Missy's feet scattered the chickens in a bad-tempered flurry as she raced up the porch steps and flung open the door. Mama shrieked and rushed toward her. “My God, chile, what they done to you? Where you hurt?” She patted Missy all over. “I knew this day would come, didn't I tell you? But you too smart to listen to your old Mama anymore. When I catch the devil who did this to you, I'm—”

“I'm fine, Mama.” Missy stripped to her slip and pulled off the stinking shoes. “There was a gator. He went for the baby, but Selma blew his head right off. Her people chopping it up now. You shoulda seen her; she saved Nathan, and me, and my job. She was”—she paused, choosing the right word for what Selma had been that day—“magnificent.”

“Lord, the words you use… Give me those things.” She held out her arms. “They got to be boiled right now.”

Mama set the washtub on the fire and filled it with seawater. Fresh water was reserved for the rinse. She had warned Missy umpteen times not to use those big words outside the house. One day, for sure, the wrong person would hear, and it would be her undoing. She piled the bloody clothes into the water with a scoop of carbolic and stirred with a big stick. Growing up, she recalled as she stirred, Missy had few friends. Her preference for books over swamp games made the local kids think she was stuck-up. And now Missy was a grown woman, she showed every sign of ending her days alone. Too smart for local fellas, too proud to play dumb. At Missy's age, Mama had already had two babies and been married to Billy, a shiftless fisherman. He drank his pay every week before doing them all a favor and going to sea one night in a storm, drunk as a skunk. The boat washed up a few days later down the coast, with only an empty bottle on board and Billy's gaff. He probably just fell in and drowned, but she liked to think of him as Jonah, living out his days in the gullet of some giant fish. He'd have plenty of time to think on what he'd done to them and, most of all, to little Leon. She caught her breath, pressed a hand to her side. Even thinking of the child's name shot a jolt of pain right through her.

She continued to stir. The red had begun to lift from the white of Missy's uniform. She skimmed the pinkish foam from the water. Had it not been for Henry Roberts stepping in to help when Billy died, things would have been a whole lot more desperate. Although he was little more than a child himself, he watched Missy so Mama could go out to work. It gave her time to get back on her feet. He was so sweet with Missy, even when she followed him around everywhere like a duckling, no doubt embarrassing him with his friends. But he was never unkind, always patient with her. Every night, he read her those stories that turned her into such a bookworm, stories of places she had never heard of, with names like Zanzibar, Ceylon, Treasure Island. She'd come in to find their heads together over a book in a circle of lamplight. And when he went away to war, it just tore Missy apart, much more so than losing her daddy.

She had heard he was back, with that group of dirty old vagrants at the veterans' camp.
Well, Henry Roberts
, she thought as she tipped away the filthy water,
you
got
some
explainin' to do.

Missy filled the bathtub with brownish water from the cistern. It had its own aroma, which she was accustomed to, and would at least rid her of the slaughterhouse reek of blood. She could hear Mama's humming from the other side of the partition. As she stepped into the bath, the water went dark. She scrubbed and scrubbed, held her nose, and submerged her head. Although she came up feeling cleaner, she knew it would be days before she lost the stench.

Water dripped from the end of her nose. Selma had saved every one of Henry's letters from France, had never given up hope, had always believed he would come back, one day, to be with his people. She kept a room in her house for him, prepared for the day of his return. But when that day finally came, it was not as she expected. He was back, but not really back, Selma said. He would not use the nice room she had, would not stay with his people, but instead would live out at the collection of dirty, smelly shacks they called a camp. Worse still, it turned out he had been there for months already—almost a year!—before he made contact, avoiding the town the whole time. He explained none of it to Selma. Missy had never seen Selma cry, but when she learned that he had come home with no word to his people, her face had just crumpled into folds of disappointment. Even so, she still started to take meals to him, walking the five miles each way to deliver her casseroles, her fried chicken, and of course her famous peach cobbler. She pronounced that her hogs ate better than the veterans. The whole town could smell the camp latrines when the wind blew the right way. Missy had heard Mr. Kincaid say many times that the camp was a disgrace, to the men and the country.

Missy scraped dried blood from under her nails as she went over the events of the afternoon. It had been such a close call. The Kincaids would be home by now. They were a strange couple; everyone said so. When Selma first told her about Mr. Kincaid's drinking, Missy had been indignantly defensive of him. Then she began to notice the signs: the mouthwash on his breath when he came home at night, the overly precise way he spoke, the scratches around the lock on the Cadillac driver's side door. It had started when Nathan was born. Selma knew why. “Some men,” she had said, “cain't look at a woman the same after a baby come out of there. I've known men to walk right out of the hospital and keep on walkin'.” And Mrs. Kincaid kept growing fatter every day, although Missy was careful with her portions. It was as if the woman thought she could get his attention just by taking up more space in the room. Her secret eating and his secret drinking… None of it made sense to Missy.

And yet the Kincaids must have loved each other once, or else why did they get married? They seemed to have everything needed for a happy life. Such a nice big house, with its wide sitting porch and high ceilings, one of the first in town to get electricity. It was meant to be filled with many more babies, but it seemed certain now that Nathan would be the only one.
The
baby
is
safe, thanks be to the Lord, and Mr. Remington.

Missy's stomach cramped with hunger. She had eaten nothing since daybreak. There would be plenty to eat at the barbecue, as always. A hog had been roasting on embers, buried deep in the sand, for two days already. It would take center stage, the meat smoky and succulent, dripping with Mama's famous sauce and surrounded by the platters of salad and corn bread. There would be fresh, sweet coquinas, dug from the beach that morning and cured in Key lime juice, and fried conch. There would be turtle steaks, harvested from the kraal that morning. There would be Key lime pie and Selma's fresh peach cobbler. And there would be bottles of beer, lots of them, glistening like jewels in their barrels of ice. She had heard about the starving folks up north, lined up for hours just for a cup of thin soup, and others in the Midwest, trying to farm land that had turned to dust.
Is
that
why
Henry
came
back
after
all
this
time? Because he tired of being hungry?

She scrubbed her hair, her ears, her face, with the precious sliver of Ivory soap she had been saving. There were so many questions she itched to ask him. That long, raised scar on his neck, shaped like a question mark.
What
tale
do
you
have
to
tell?
She traced a finger down her own neck in the same shape. She hoped he would come to the barbecue and hoped just as strongly he would not. The veterans had been invited, she had heard, against the better judgment of many.