River, cross my heart

by Clarke, Breena

  She imagined the day. She put aside the thoughts of how the mother would wish to see her two girls and saw them as the children they must have been. They would have been naively misbehaving, following the unexamined, unconscious urges of children. Knowing so little about fear and danger, they would have been simply walking.

  Johnnie Mae had taken to water like a tadpole. The sizable stream a quarter mile behind Old Man Walker's place, near Marabel, North Carolina, was enough of a waterway to float a raft. Rafting had been the way he brought his crops to market in the older days. Alice's papa had a habit oi swim-

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  ming the width of his stream for pleasure and his constitutional. Before Johnnie Mae learned to walk, Old Man Walker swam the stream with her tucked under one arm. He'd stroke with his free arm and grunt and spit water in front of him. Johnnie Mae had floated along, skimming the surface of the water, held up by her grandpa. Instinctively she kept her eyes wide open and her little arms and legs stroking. She and Grandpa would dog-paddle out to the center of the stream. Johnnie Mae believed for all the world that she was towing Grandpa. Old Man Walker laughed out loud and wide. "The squaw's baby can swim. She's a natural swimmer." The water was thrilling to her. Her baby heart pumped like forty — pumped as if the force that propelled her through the water was of her own devising.

  Alice had always been a slight bit afraid o{ water, had not taken to it like Papa and the boys. She and her sisters had never followed the urge to swim in their papa's stream. The boys and Papa took a lusty thrill in the water and had made a particularly masculine exercise of it. Alice had no particular reason to fear the water. She'd never come close to drowning because she'd never even tried to swim. Fear depends on a certain knowledge, however incomplete, of the dread consequences of an action. Children are unafraid of the fishhook until they have once snagged their hand. Forever after they've got some reaction to it: wariness, caution, distaste, some something that keeps them from getting snagged again. Alice had never been afraid of water because she'd never put herself at the mercy of it. But she was leery of it. Johnnie Mae—was she scared of water? Had she ever been? Didn't even Clara's drowning make her frightened?

  Clara's footsteps would have been smaller, softer than

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  Johnnie Mae's or the other girls'. The branches that slapped at Alice's rib cage as she passed by would have slapped at Clara's cheeks. The branches would have stung her face and she would have stifled her discomfort so as not to be left behind by the others. Threading through brambles at the bank, Alice was surprised at how difficult it was to find and keep to the path.

  She avoided the edge of the river. She was frightened of the Potomac. She felt the need to be protective of her own life. If she'd been there the day Clara drowned, would she have leapt into the water to save her? If it had been only the two of them? If there had been no one else near who could have swum to Clara, would she have gone into the water? Frightened and unable to swim? Would she have gone with Clara rather than stood on the shore? Would she have told herself, in the split seconds she would have had to decide, that she had another daughter to live for—a husband, too— and others?

  Alice shivered and her shoulders rose to touch her ear-lobes. In truth, Johnnie Mae had done — the other girls who were there told it — what she, Clara's mother, could not. Johnnie Mae had dived and dived and tried to save Clara. That, with all her fears and foibles, Alice could never have done.

  Always says "Clara" now when she talks about her. She says "Clara" now. She doesn't dare call her "Rat," even in her mind. She doesn't dare whisper "Rat." Her mama would tan her blue and boil her in oil if she heard her say "Rat" now. She wishes she could get her jaws to say it. She wishes she could hear herself say "Rat" out loud. She doesn't even sound like herself when she says "Clara" sometimes. It feels like she's talking about somebody else, or that somebody other than herself is doing the talking.

  "I think I've forgot her. But if you remember that you forgot somebody—or come real close—then you've caught yourself in time."

  Rat was the perfect name for her. Clara was too big a name anyway. Rat is what you get from Clara if you turn it around on the page when you write the letters. Mouse was more like what she acted like, but you can't get that from turning the letters around and dropping some and adding a tail. You get Rat and that's her — Clara the rat, Clara the

  tattletale, Clara that couldn't keep her mouth closed when you wanted her to and couldn't open her mouth to say anything when she was supposed to.

  Johnnie Mae saw Clara Bow in the pictures at the Blue Mouse Theater, and Clara Bow had skin as white as snow-flakes. Clara, when she was a little baby, was tiny and pecan brown. But Mama had called the baby Clara, and the sound blended with her sweet skin smell and her little baby cuteness.

  Rat was the name Johnnie Mae gave her. Her mama hated that name because she hated rats. Mama hated them because she was scared of them. Some of the houses they'd rented in Georgetown had rats. Mama wasn't used to them. She said that in the country all they had were field mice plus a whole lot of other creatures. In the country they had wild game like possums, snakes, woodchucks, snapping turtles, but not these city rats. The city rats came up to the house bold and dirty and low to the ground. And the city rats weren't afraid of people either.

  One evening at dusk Mama was cleaning fish Papa had brought from a fishing trip he had gone on with Mr. Birdaxe and Mr. Pud Allen and some two or three other men he called "the boys." They had gone up by the conduit to drop lines. Mama was gutting the catch on the back porch steps of the house they'd lived in on Grace Street. Everything about that house was rickety and it kept a smell of mildew.

  Johnnie Mae handed fish out of the bucket to Mama and put the cleaned ones in another pan. The pail Mama was dropping the guts and heads into was sitting one step below the step she was sitting on. Mama chopped off the heads with the same hatchet she used to chop off the heads of wrung chickens. She lay the fish flat on the step, whacked off the

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  head in one clean motion, and pushed the head off the step into the basin with the flat of the hatchet. After a while the blood-and-guts odor got thick in the air and a big, wide rat swaggered up through the yard toward them. He walked out in the open, slowly. He wasn't one bit afraid of anyone. He walked toward where Mama was sitting, stopped about four feet away, and locked eyes with her. There was absolutely no fear in the rat. Somebody's poison had made him cocky. Mama was as stiff in the back as the porch rail. She was scared. Anybody who knew her would know it by the way she held her bottom lip, as if she needed to clamp down to keep from screaming out. She told Johnnie Mae to get up slowly and walk back into the house and close the screen door. Then she rose from the step and sat in the chair the girl had been sitting in. She placed the hatchet in her lap and sat completely still in the chair. She waited for the rat to move. He didn't. He stared at her. After a long wait, the expression in his eyes changed from pure aggression to desperation. The rat's nose twitched in the direction of the fish heads floating in the pail. Mama said later that she knew he was rabid or had just gotten some poison because of the way he eyed that pail. He was mad with thirst and would likely attack anyone between him and the pail. Mama crossed her hands over the hatchet without moving her arms. She slowed her breathing and must have lulled the rat into thinking she was frozen in fear. When he lunged straight for the fish heads, she raised the hatchet up and brought it down on the rat's outstretched neck. The hatchet split him open and got stuck in the step. Mama sat back in the chair and stared at the split-open rat and the fish guts dripping down the porch steps. "Lord have mercy," she said. After a little while she got a bucket of water,

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  washed down the steps, and cleaned off the hatchet. Then she finished cleaning the rest of the catch.

  Later that night Mama told Papa they'd have to move— would have to find a house on higher ground becaus
e Grace Street was too close to the river. The rats just came up out of the river.

  The Potomac River disgorges a fair number of rats every night into the streets of Georgetown. They skulk along Water Street and exploit swampy, subterranean tunnels to get into basements all through the town. Aunt Ina whispered to Mama and Papa in the kitchen one night that rats had shunned the Potomac for three days after Clara drowned. From a perch at the top of the steps, Johnnie Mae listened to the adults' conversation after they'd sent her off to sleep. Aunt Ina said, in a hushed voice punctuated with "umph, umph," that folks said after Clara's body was drawn out of the river, hundreds of rats — later, thousands of rats it was—had climbed out and stood staring back at the water. Aunt Ina said that someone said—once she said Press Parker, once she said it was Miz Dottie Sham—that it was as if those rats blamed the river and were ashamed to swim in it. Those nasty rats that will skim garbage off the surface of the water, with greasy sludge covering their backs, were thick along the riverbank for three nights after Clara drowned! Aunt Ina told it as absolute fact though it was only hearsay.

  Clara the rat hightailed it down Dumbarton Avenue, run-ning scared one day. One day! Every other day, just about. Old fraidy cat! It didn't take much to get Clara wailing and hightailing it down the street. Of course, she was a little girl and her feelings got hurt real easy.

  Her feelings got hurt pretty bad one day by the big old

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  rawboned girl called Bessie Daley. Bessie was a lobster-red white girl whose mother and father got drunk every Saturday at dusk and stayed pie-eyed and belligerent until Monday morning. Bessie's father was a general laborer who mostly cleaned furnaces at the white churches and up at Georgetown University. Most of the time you saw him, his lobster-red face was half covered with soot. Bessie's mother spent most of her day lounging on a sofa in her front room. She was a daylong drinker, and neither her clothes, her hair, nor her home was ever quite clean.

  This was what got Johnnie Mae mad—this betrayal. She charged down O Street in a rage of indignation with Clara following behind, still bawling. Who did that big, old dumb-looking gal think she was, calling Clara out of her name? Bessie, who pretended to be a friend to everybody, called Clara a dirty little nigger in front of her cousins from out of town. She had always petted Clara and talked silly to her and had given her penny candy from time to time. She had made a point of seeking out the Bynum girls for friendship because she wasn't too popular among her own. This fact wasn't lost on the girls, especially on Johnnie Mae. And Johnnie Mae wanted to shake Clara and set her head bobbing because she couldn't stand up for herself or stop herself from crying. But she knew what her duty was. It was plain: She'd have to whip the daylights out of Bessie Daley.

  Johnnie Mae landed a solid punch up beside Bessie Daley's broad nose and knocked her on her tailbone before two words had passed between them. In fact, the punch was prefaced by only two words, delivered with a big voice full oi threat and vow: "Bessie Daley!" The punch caused Bessie to wail and carry on and started a stream of blood and mucus coursing out

  of her nose. Bessie and any others who had it in mind to pick on Clara learned a lesson that day- Johnnie Mae could take care of herself and Clara, too.

  The first day Johnnie Mae came back around to Ann-Martha's to deliver bundles of laundry after Clara died, the woman looked her in the eyes with the plain, unequivocal look of a bull. "You push her? Did you?" Ann-Martha asked.

  This was the question that nobody else had asked. Not even Johnnie Mae's parents had asked her this. But Ann-Martha came right out with it and in so doing gave Johnnie Mae the first chance to say out loud, "No! No, Miss Ann-Martha, I didn't push her."

  Johnnie Mae was going to go on and say that she really loved Clara despite how she may have treated her sometimes. But Ann-Martha raised her hand sharply like a traffic cop and said, "That's all I want to know. That's all." They fell into their work and didn't speak about Clara again.

  Four large galvanized tin tubs were arranged in a row on Ann-Martha's kitchen floor. There was a tub for soaking clothes, a tub for clothes being scrubbed, a tub for rinsing, and a tub of soaking baby diapers. Ann-Martha did three, sometimes four separate washes a day and insisted that delicates and coarse goods, bedding and colored items could not be washed or rinsed together. Baby diapers also received a special handling. Ann-Martha was particular about how the washes were done, a fact that was belied by the slovenly look about her person and her house.

  The wood stove roared under several large pots of boiling

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  water. A dwindling pile oi wood was near the back door next to an empty bin tor coal and a half-tilled one for newspapers. Outside oi the effort she put into actually washing clothes, Ann-Martha had to expend considerable in keeping her stove alive, too.

  Little for food preparation was visible in her kitchen. There were only two coffee cups, one spoon, a tin oi sugar, a tin oi Luzianne coffee, and a coffeepot. An opened box of Argo starch was on the kitchen table, and flecks of white clung to the side of Ann-Martha's face.

  Ann-Martha worked quickly, pinching open her clothespins and arranging sheets neatly on the lines, overlapping their corners. The effort caused her to huff and snort like a locomotive. Oddly, Ann-Martha was always anxious about the clothespins she carried in a large pocket in her apron. From this pocket, which created an additional layer to her wide midriff, she transferred each clothespin to her mouth and then to her fingers. Each one reversed this track back to her apron when clothes were removed from the lines. She hardly ever left one on the table or anywhere about the premises.

  Johnnie Mae stood and waited for Ann-Martha to finish assembling clean bundles. She placed herself near the end of the table closest to the door and rested her fingers against its edge. She knew better than to drum her fingers on Ann-Martha's table, and she knew better than to sit down in the woman's presence unless invited to. Johnnie Mae had been taught that it was not proper for a girl to show impatience or to be too womanish.

  All the washing was Ann-Martha's province. She had made that plain from early on in their relationship. As she

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  spat snuff juice into a tin can near her feet, Ann-Martha had let slide from under her lips, "I know what dirts to look for. A young girl like you won't know what-all to be looking for. You had your monthly yet?"

  Johnnie Mae had felt warmth creep into her face and looked down at her feet. "No, ma'am," she said. Not wanting to be thought a mere child and wanting credit for everything she did know, even allowing that she had much to learn, she said, "I know about that thing. I know what to look for."

  Ann-Martha had chuckled, recognizing the girl's pluck. "Once you've had your first monthly you have to be careful of the mens. Don't let them come up on you or you'll get a belly. And for God's sake, don't let 'em come behind you. Don't let them in there or you'll get a big butt. Where you think all these big-butt women got theirs? Steer clear of mens. Keep your back to the wall." Ann-Martha roared with laughter at the end of this "talk," and Johnnie Mae narrowed her eyes at the woman to make it clear she didn't believe a word of this but was too well brought up to answer back. She knew a girl was officially considered a woman after she'd had her first monthly. And she knew you could get "in trouble" if you let a man have at you after this point. But everybody knew that the surest way to get a big butt was to have a fondness for buttered biscuits and jam.

  On Wednesdays, the delivery route started at the Alban Towers Hotel up on Wisconsin Avenue. The wagon was loaded down with a large pile of sheets for the hotel and starched shirts for Mr. Wainwright and Mr. Percy, bachelor men who lived at Alban Towers. Johnnie Mae had to be careful not to tip over the wagon under the top-heavy load. If the

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  hotel's sheets arrived soiled, the hawk-raced woman who was the head housekeeper wouldn't take them and wouldn't pay.

  Mr. Wainwright was always cour
tly. He howed as he took his bundle oi shirts and howed again as he handed her his knot of dirty shirts and his payment. Mr. Percy scowled at Johnnie Mae's intrusion and pushed his soiled shirts toward her with his foot. It was Mr. Percy's habit to place his pay-ment on the edge of the carpet in the hallway and quickly close his door before Johnnie Mae had bent to pick up the coins.

  The hotel's sheets returning to Ann-Martha were a large, smelly bundle that took up most of the wagon. Care had to be taken with the dirty bundles, too. Ann-Martha would be salty if they arrived with extra dirt from the street.

  On the second trip, neatly folded, sweet-smelling baby diapers were delivered to five households on Dumbarton Avenue. Ann-Martha had drilled Johnnie Mae to deliver the clean diapers as she headed west along Dumbarton and to pick up the dirty ones as she came back east toward Wisconsin Avenue. That way, clean diapers would not ride next to the soiled ones returning to be boiled and stirred.

  The fragrance of the returning pile was ripe. As Johnnie Mae wound her way back to Ann-Martha's, she thought about Clara's reaction to the stink of the sheets and diapers in the summer. Johnnie Mae giggled. Clara had often made faces and threatened to puke as they pulled the stinking piles back to Ann-Martha's.

  There was rest °ct between Johnnie Mae and Ann-Martha as concerned the money. The girl had enough moxie to ask for the payments from customers and was smart and honest

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  enough to bring it all back. From what Ann-Martha could see, there wasn't much foolishness about the girl, and her shoe-button eyes were level when the time came for getting paid. She would not be shorted by accident or design.

  Ann-Martha counted out Johnnie Mae's pay and grunted, "Tomorrow," to end their commerce. Johnnie Mae knew it was her place then to say, "Yes, ma'am," and leave.