Walking Through Shadows (3 page)

I don’t know exactly when Stoney fell in love with Sheila, but he did. I never doubted his feelings for her although many people did. It was hard to understand how he could love a skinny girl with a hump on her back, breasts no bigger than green plums, and a seeming slowness in her head.

I had never thought of the dairy barn as being a romantic spot, but apparently it was. Maybe it was the feel of the cow teats, the warm frothing milk, the scent of the grains, the holy early morning darkness that held both fading stars and rising pink light.

Each morning, seven days a week, the cows ambled into the flood-lit lot outside the barn where the black and white Holsteins and tan Jerseys huddled together with their heads crowded over each other’s flanks. The Holsteins were better milk producers than the Jerseys, but Jersey milk had a higher percentage of butterfat, so Daddy had bred both about equally. All of them waited patiently, swatting flies, lowing softly until their name was called. Digger, Stoney, Johnny, and Shorty were the milkers. One of them would lean out the door and yell, “Steve” or “Teddy” or “Bell,” and like patients in a doctor’s waiting room, when they heard their names, their heads would jerk up, and they would thread their way to the milking parlor. When a cow entered the barn, she would walk straight to the feed trough where the layers of grain were mixed with shovels, and when she stretched her thin neck toward her meal, the wooden latch on the trough would be lowered and locked into place. As the cow ate, she would relax like most of us do, and then her milk would come down, swelling her pink udder to sometimes an amazing size. After washing the bag with soapy water, strong rhythmic hands reached out to the teats to spray white gold into the bucket. Then after about ten minutes, when the cow was dry, she would be freed and ushered out of the barn.

The smaller buckets of milk were then poured into the big silver cans and taken into the next room where the liquid would be poured through cheesecloth into the cooler. Daddy or Robert would then take up the cooler and drain the milk into a can with a spout so that it could easily be funneled into clear glass bottles. The cardboard caps that said “Cottons’ Dairy” were pressed on, the bottles loaded into crates and placed in ice in the truck. Finally, the cows, unaware of the business they’d created, were let out to graze in the pasture until evening when the entire process would be repeated. No one worried about pasteurization back then; people felt safe enough to drink milk right out of a teat, which I saw Digger do one afternoon.

Sheila’s job began after the last cow left the barn. She would begin in the feed room, washing the floor with the hose, sweeping shit and pee and spilled grain out into the lot. But after a while, she came earlier to watch the Jerseys and Holsteins amble into and out of the barn. A lot of the Jerseys had nasty temperaments and they would kick at the milkers, scornful of the slaps and blows and curses that rained on them. One day soon after Sheila came to us, we saw Stoney get slapped back with a strong flick of Sid’s tail.

When Stoney heard our laughter, a frown appeared on his face, but then he looked straight at Sheila and smiled. Mama called me inside just then to watch Lil’ Bit while she went down to Grandma’s for a visit, so I wasn’t present when Stoney asked Sheila out the first time. They went for a ride in his battered Ford truck, which blew a tire on Enterprise Road. He didn’t have a spare, so they walked nearly three miles back home on the dark gravel roads.

“On the walk home, I stumbled on some loose rocks, and Stoney caught my arm and nearly lifted me right off the ground,” Sheila told me the next afternoon. “He is strong like a bull, but not bad-tempered like Franklin.” Franklin was our 1,500-pound registered bull whom we fed with a pitchfork, his horn and nose roped in a half-hitch. Everyone was scared of him, even Daddy, who called his fear “respect.”

We were sitting on the metal rockers in the front yard beneath the water oak. Lil’ Bit sat on a pallet at our feet, laughing at the leaves that drifted down on the breeze. It would rain soon, and we were enjoying the unusual coolness of an August day. Sheila picked up a leaf and twirled it in her hand. “It were my first date, and I kissed him, let him rub up against my chest. Do you think that’s wrong?”

I pretended to ponder her words, but I was actually thinking this was the first time anyone had asked me about right and wrong. Usually I was the one being told, not the one being asked. “I think it’s romantic,” I said. “I would’ve let him kiss me.”

Sheila got up and flung herself down on the grass, and staring up at the aluminum sky, she whispered, “I love him. I do.”

“Is he going to ask you for another date?” I asked, rising to pull the crab-crawling Lil’ Bit back onto the pallet.

She grinned. “Already has. Tonight.” Her brow wrinkled and her eyes bore into me. “Do you think it’s possible he might fall in love with me?” She shook her head fast. “No, not with this.” She shrugged her hump.

I didn’t know what to say. Here I was being consulted on problematic issues that were beyond my scope. I cuddled Lil’ Bit, kissed his cheek. “Well…” I stalled. “Anything is possible, Grandma says,” I told her.

Even Mama got caught up in the romance between Sheila and Stoney. After I told her they were “stepping out,” she said, “but she doesn’t have any clothes.” And before an hour had passed, I was standing at the smoke house door with an armful of Mama’s old dresses. They were all too big, hems hung unevenly over her hump to her ankles, shoulder seams to the center of her upper arms, but Sheila didn’t care one bit. She twirled around the dark room in Mama’s old green house dress like she was wearing an elegant evening gown. “How do I look?” she asked. “I wish I had a mirror.”

“You can use the one over my dresser. Come on,” I said, pulling her arm toward the door.

When Mama saw how pitiful she looked, she insisted on making emergency alterations, and she quickly stitched up the hem to accommodate the hump. We bunched in the waist with a belt, but we couldn’t, on such short notice, do much about the drooping cloth that hung over her shoulders. When Sheila looked in the mirror, she slowly lifted her hands to her face; like a blind person her fingers traced her cheekbones and jaw line as though she were trying to discover her own identity. She did look different. I had never noticed the little green flecks in her blue eyes, but the watermelon green of her dress brought them out. The only words I remember her saying as she turned to Mama, who was standing behind her smiling at her reflection in my wavy mirror, were “God bless you.”

God kept on showering blessings on Sheila, but He must have used them all up on her because before the month was out, Aunt Doris died. Sheila baby-sat for Lil’ Bit when we went to the funeral. Daddy was a pallbearer, and he looked more unnatural than the corpse in his tightly buttoned white shirt, his red face protruding over his Adam’s apple. Miraculously, Aunt Doris looked beautiful with her red hair curled softly around her face, her pale pink nails resting on a white lawn gown trimmed in blue ribbon. At the feast afterward, I sat with my head down and refused the fancy food the ladies from our church kept offering me. I had prayed for this; it was my fault Aunt Doris was dead. Ask and it shall be given. The Lord had given me just what I asked for. I hated myself. Was Aunt Doris looking down on me from heaven shaking her red curls at my blackest of hearts? Did she know I had been the cause of her being taken away from poor Uncle Walter who couldn’t stop sobbing into his initialed handkerchief? I couldn’t live with the guilt. I would go home and stab myself with the butcher knife Mama used for cutting up chicken parts. I would thrust the knife straight into my heart and blood would spurt out of my chest like it did from the hogs’ necks when the blade sliced their throats on hog-killing day. I would drop the knife, sink to the floor, whisper, “I’m sorry,” and then die.

When we finally got home that night after Mama had hugged Uncle Walter for the last time and invited him to come see Lil’ Bit any day, I was too tired to kill myself. I had fallen asleep lying on the backseat of the Dodge on the way home, and I was barely conscious as Mama helped me undress and get into my nightgown. I remember Sheila saying Lil’ Bit was “good as gold” and that he went to sleep with a smile on his face. He didn’t know his true mother had been buried that day and that he would never see her face, hear her voice, or remember the kisses and hugs she had given him. But Mama said we would tell him about his true mama, and he would know her as part of himself. He would see her red hair when he looked in the mirror.

I kept worrying about needing to kill myself and face judgment. Mama asked me did I need a dose of castor oil, was I feeling poorly, did I want to talk about anything. No, no, and no I said. The last person on the face of the earth I would tell that I was a murderer would be my mama. I couldn’t bear to see the look on her face if she knew me for the monster I was. Two days after the funeral I forced myself to open the kitchen drawer that held the knife, and I stared a long time at the wide silver blade that winked up at me, hissing “Pick me up. Do it. Do it.” And when I slammed the drawer shut, I could hear a faint word rising out of the wood. “Coward.”

The day when Uncle Walter came for his first visit with Lil’ Bit was the day I knew for certain that Sheila was my true Best Friend. He knocked on the front door, causing a stir in our house because only the preacher and strangers ever lifted the big brass knocker, which sounded like a bass drum. As was our habit, Mama and I ran to my bedroom first to peer out the window before deciding to answer the knock. When Mama saw that it was Uncle Walter, she put her hand to her mouth. “My Lord!” she said. “It’s Walter acting like company.”

He looked like company too, dressed in navy slacks pressed with a crease, and a beige shirt that was scorched on the right sleeve. When Mama opened the door, he stepped back like he had changed his mind about coming to see us. “Walter, what a wonderful surprise,” Mama said.

“I should’ve called, I reckon,” he said inching toward us. “I just got up this morning and said today is the day I got to go see my son.” He scratched his head like he was puzzling about something. “Got to go out on a run to Chicago tomorrow. I’ll be gone quite a spell, so I thought, I’d…today… would be…”

Mama walked out onto the porch, and holding the door open, she pulled him inside. “Lil’ Bit is in the kitchen. Come see.”

I followed them into the room where Lil’ Bit sat in his playpen chewing on a squeaky rubber toy. Every time he heard the funny screeching sounds the toy dog made, he chuckled, shaking his entire body with delight. Uncle Walter stopped dead still in the doorway. Finally, he spoke. “My God! He’s got her hair. Just like her.” And then he choked up and his shoulders caved in to his chest as he tried to walk toward his son.

I couldn’t take it. I had had enough. It wasn’t right for a murderer to be standing in the room watching the devastating results of her crime. Later it came to me that there would be a lot less crime if the people who committed them had to see the family grieve right in front of them. I doubted that there were many people mean enough in the world to stand it. I rushed out the backdoor and climbed the fig tree fighting the branches back like they were strong arms trying to stop me. I went as high as I could and lay out on a branch, rubbing my cheek into the bark. I wanted to wear away every bit of my skin, but I felt no pain.

“Annette.” I looked down on Sheila’s face tilted up toward me. “I seen you running out here. What’s wrong?”

I sat up, shook my head. I couldn’t tell her. She would hate me.

“I’m coming up,” Sheila said. And I watched her as she climbed awkwardly, bracing her feet on forked limbs, testing a branch for strength, and then pulling herself up until she reached the stout limb across from me. She looked down. “Whoa, this is great. I feel like a bird. I feel like I could just fly off here and not touch the ground.”

I smiled in spite of the boulder-sized rock lying on my chest. She settled her humped back against the trunk and straddled the branch. She looked like an elf with her pixie bangs falling over her eyes. She was quiet for a minute, and then she reached across and tapped my arm. “You gonna tell me or not?”

“Not,” I said. “Can’t. It’s too terrible.”

“Ain’t nothing as terrible when told as when kept locked up.”

“You believe that?” I asked.

She nodded. “Shoot, I know it.”

I looked into her blue eyes and saw the pond, the sky, blue jay feathers, sapphires, and Lil’ Bit’s blue diaper shirt. I saw the blue of unconditional love, true blue. She wouldn’t judge me. “Oh Sheila, I prayed for her to die.” Released from the bondage of silence, my words ran out and looped around the fig leaves, spun down the tree trunk, and cut through the heavy air toward my Best Friend. When I had called myself every name I could think, including coward for my inability to commit suicide, I ended up crying with great gulping heaves that felt like I had used the stabbing knife on myself after all.

Sheila waited until my wails dwindled to sobs. Then she touched my arm and pinched it hard. I was surprised I could still feel anything, but I winced in pain. “That’s real,” she said. “All this other is just shadow. You can walk through shadows if you watch the sun and do it just right.”

I shook my head. I didn’t understand.

Sheila licked her finger and wiped the spot on my arm with her spit. “Shadows is just imaginings. I thought on this one time after Papa beat me for eating the last piece of cornbread he were saving for hisself. I runned out in the yard and seen my shadow jumping up ahead of me. And I says to myself that ain’t me; that’s just dark lines shaped like me. But I knowed that I had to get rid of that black girl who was full up with fearing and worrying and sadness.” She looked up and I followed her eyes through the green canopy of the leaves to the puzzle pieces of sky. “Now most folks think we can’t get away from our shadows. You move, it moves, you stand still, it does too. But I learned how to walk right through my shadow.” She smiled at me. “You wanna know how to do it?”