Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Their fury was consuming Phyllis. She had killed who she shouldn’t and failed to kill who she should. They were not forgiving. Not eighty years later, and the weight heavy as it had ever been.

  The oracle did not feel equal to that. She did not want to confront the judgment of those implacable old souls.

  But if her grandmother’s story was true, if she was like her nana, like her great-aunt Winnie, then it was her duty to bear witness. And without her, Phyllis would face whatever was coming alone.

  So one night, after Mrs. Grundy had left and Phyllis had gone to bed with a strangely knowing look and a warning to be careful, Tamara sat on the floor in front of the cold fireplace and unwrapped her neglected cards. They ought to have been eager, desperate for attention after so long in the dark, but they moved sluggish and heavy as she bent them into their tricks. As if they knew.

  The oracle fixed the question in her mind and repeated it out loud: “Spirits of my ancestors, guardians who have guided our hands: what must she do?”

  She shuffled three times more, repeating the question each time. Then she took the top card and laid it at the point of the star pattern. Queen of diamonds, the African queen, with her blue-black face and wise eyes. The ancestor. She took the next card and laid it on the point to the right. King of diamonds; one of the suicide kings, African like the queen, with his axe swinging down toward his head.

  She touched the top of the next card—

  —the earth growled and trembled—

  —blue fire all around her—

  —a crash upstairs, something throwing itself against the wall—

  —the one who had fallen, the once-beloved, the now-despised, who carried on her shoulders the fury of their thousand disappointments, who could have been a savior of her people and now would never be saved—

  —she called out the oracle’s other name—

  —called it out of love.

  Tamara broke from the cards and ran upstairs, ran through the remnants of her oracle’s sight, the hot wind of blue light. A fork from the tray Tamara had forgotten to take downstairs flew over her head and speared itself into the hallway wall. Phyllis grabbed the plate, broke it into shards. She was silent, tears and sweat mixing and dripping down her chin. Tamara stood there, paralyzed and useless, as her friend aimed to kill her. Tamara braced herself. But in a movement so fast it did not seem human, Phyllis jumped and twisted her entire body in the second before her fingers released. The shards shattered against the floor. Pea fell to her knees then, before the hands could find some other tool, and swung her arms against her belly.

  “You want her, don’t you?” she panted. “Don’t you? You can’t kill me just yet.”

  Her right hand lifted itself up, as though in peace. Or like the axe hand of the suicide king.

  Then it lowered itself to the floor. Pea shuddered. Sweat dripped steadily from her nose while she hauled in rasping breaths.

  The hands were hers again; her own tired flesh.

  9

  A second letter from Clyde arrived during spring’s first bloom, that last week of April. Tamara sat on the front stoop with a stole around her shoulders and steeled herself. She figured he hadn’t thrown her over after all, if he was writing again. But she worried, in any case. Would he give her an answer, at last, to her impossible dilemma?

  Dear Tammy,

  I apologize for my last letter. I haven’t been thinking very clearly these days. You’d think it was the fighting, but it isn’t that so much as the waiting. You stagger back to camp and every missing face hits you, you check the casualty rolls, you sit around waiting for your next chance to get them back. The boys here are something else, Tammy. Cracking, sharp as tacks, all ready to go. I got us to put on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream last week. The boys and I memorized our lines together since I only have the one copy, and the one playing Bottom was a hoot, he’d just mix it up with his own fresh language when he got the notion. He even had the white officers howling. That was a good day. His plane got shot down yesterday and he’s listed as missing.

  If Toby’s still alive, we’ll get him back. Uncle Sam won’t leave him out there. I have to believe that.

  They tell us not to write about hard things in our letters back home, but they don’t know you, Tammy; you’re as hard as any soldier, behind that dancing laugh of yours.

  I’ve been thinking about your play. It sounds terrific, solid, but I’m not so sure you’ve thought through all the implications of this choice of yours.

  You say it’s between a “regular Joe” and a no-good killer: all right, I’m with you. But then you make it sound like this regular-type person is really so convinced he’s gonna get into heaven. Now, I don’t claim to know much religious philosophy, Tammy, but isn’t someone who is so sure they got a right to heaven just the sort of person least likely to go there? Does just avoiding bad things make you a good person? Don’t you have to do good things for that? I think you get a lot more power in your third act if old Joe starts to realize that he’s not going to skate through on a fast-ticket to the pearly gates just because he lived his whole life being careful. I think it means something if by being the kind of person who would sacrifice a little to give Mr. Killer a lot he becomes someone who deserves heaven, even as he is renouncing it. You see what I mean? The bind now isn’t “What will I give up for this awful person who doesn’t deserve anything anyway?” but “What kind of person am I, really? Can I enjoy heaven when the only way I get there is after I’ve proven to myself that I don’t deserve it?” You see what I’m getting at? Don’t make the dilemma just about the consequences of where old Joe is headed (because, let’s face it, most of us have seen hell here on earth and purgatory is probably a damn sight better). Make Joe and the rest of us really squirm in our seats. Make him judge himself.

  As for what he chooses at the end—depends on how you want it to go. Existentialism would leave him there, trapped in his choice. Theater of the Cruel would make him get on that boat after pushing old Killer into the river, just in case. But, hey, how about some Lawrenceville optimism, Tammy? Maybe that’s another way out, or in.

  If I make it back from this, you know I’m yours.

  All my love,

  Clyde

  Tamara looked up and wasn’t too surprised to see Little Sammy jog past her with a fishing pole tossed over one shoulder and a bucket of worms in one hand.

  He looked just like he had right before the cops shot him down, except for the small detail that she could see the muddy ground through the outline of his bare feet. At least he couldn’t feel the chill.

  “Sammy?” she whispered. He looked around, as though he could hear something but couldn’t tell what. Then a breeze lifted her hair and he broke apart like a dandelion gone to seed. She imagined she smelled the old creek in it, the green, rotting heat of deep summer, the grass crushed beneath her toes, the smooth, dry snick of the cards beneath her fingers back when they had told her that Little Sammy was going to die, and she had said nothing at all.

  “Tammy,” Pea called down from the window, “is there something from Dev?”

  Tamara glanced down at the other letter that had arrived in the military packet, addressed in that familiar loose, educated handwriting.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, let me read it first, at least.”

  Tammy stood up like a toy soldier and climbed the stairs.

  Pea was in the window seat, propped up to ease her back. She was swollen with that baby, round as a ripe berry. Just now, Tamara couldn’t stand to look at her. She dropped Dev’s letter on Pea’s chest and turned to go.

  “Are you ever planning on telling me what devil has been gnawing on your insides for the last few months?”

  Tamara froze. “I’m doing my best.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to talk?”

  It wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She left Pea there, so sick and fat and horrible. She left the house without a word and got in Dev’s car and
took a drive.

  She kept going past River Road, past the new convenience store and grocery and their already-decimated racks of daily papers, past the shuttered windows of the mayor’s house, and then the hasty fence that surrounded the remains of the old church and graveyard. Tamara tried not to look too closely, afraid of the ghosts of a place where so many had died. But soon she cleared the town, and surrounded by the early spring fields of the country, she rolled down the window and took a breath. The warming air smelled faintly of woodsmoke and the dung from the cattle farm nearly five miles over, which reminded them of its presence when the wind was right. The farms were bigger in her part of Virginia, and by this time of year the first shoots would already be stubbling through the earth, but she pulled to the edge of the road and trembled with the sick relief of being, at last, somewhere she understood. She and Clyde had never known a spring together, but Tamara could almost imagine him beside her, his high-cuffed pants showing that strip of ashy skin that dried out under the stage lights, as he rehearsed his lines from Hamlet, that passionate tenor scaring the crows from the corn: “I am thy father’s spirit/Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,/And for the day confined to fast in fires…”

  She leaned across the dashboard, rubbed her cheek into pooled sunlight, and wondered if she would ever feel warm again. It was impossible, had been impossible for months, but now she had no fight left in her. Clyde had seen right through her little game, and he probably didn’t even know it. He was the real Lawrenceville optimist, the genuine article, a good boy from down south who honored his elders and opened doors and volunteered for a hellhole of a war before he could get respectably drafted into it and honestly thought Tammy was the sweet, book-loving singer he’d fallen for all those years ago. He didn’t know shit, and she wasn’t even a good enough person to tell him. She’d orchestrated his love for her the way she orchestrated one of her legendary nights at the Pelican. But this wasn’t a night on the town, this was the rest of her life, and it turned out she’d stopped playing. She’d loved Dev, but she’d always been playing—was it really so surprising he had noticed? He wasn’t like Clyde, so country-fresh he was still cooling on the windowsill. He was good, but he was hard, too. He had to be, to survive for so long as an undercover cop at the heart of Victor’s empire. He lied as much as she did, but for a noble purpose. He had seen her, and loved her anyway. Was Clyde strong enough for that?

  Make the audience really squirm in their seats, he told her. Make “Joe” judge himself, even if it wasn’t fair. Even if Joe never killed anyone. Joe had always been lying: to the killer, to the ferryman, to the audience. To the cards. To herself.

  Tamara lurched upright, threw open the door, and ran a few steps into the crunching brown grass at the edge of the field. She sank to her knees and pounded on the earth and howled like a wounded dog.

  She came back an hour later. Her hands were steady again, her eyes red, her heart hollowed out. She climbed the stairs to Phyllis’s room.

  Tamara paused in the doorway. Pea was sleeping on her side, a pillow against her belly, and Tamara felt something swell inside her, something like the oracle’s knowledge, but her own. Tammy had agreed to come up here after Phyllis had been rushed to the hospital that last night at the Pelican, when she had nearly lost the baby. Tamara had imagined herself a Ruth to Phyllis’s Naomi. She had anticipated the boredom of short gray days that folded upon themselves like crepe silk. She had anticipated claustrophobia and desperation for a decent glass of bubbly with a well-dressed man who could tell good jokes.

  But Tammy hadn’t anticipated the sweetness. The way Pea looked in the morning, with sun spilling that warm light across her wide forehead, settling in the valleys of her slightly parted lips, her throat, her thighs. With that pillow on her belly it looked still more mountainous, and sometimes she would hum in her sleep, and sometimes she would smile. The way they talked, like words were lumps of sugar and they were children gorging at Christmas Eve. They could talk the hands off the clock, but even the things they never said lingered in Tamara’s throat like candy.

  She had never loved anyone like she loved Pea. Not even Clyde. Sure, she and Phyllis had kissed that night with Dev and even now, in certain light, she didn’t mind the notion of touching Pea until she came. But the love she felt wasn’t really that kind—it was a blood love, a bone love, and it ricocheted off of her other loves at unexpected angles.

  She couldn’t—though the cards spoke in spades and sixes, though Pea’s second dream had come and gone, though her hands were wild and corrupt weapons still tied to her body, though the choice they demanded of her was impossible—Tamara couldn’t bear the thought of losing—

  Phyllis turned over and opened her wide, clear eyes. “Well?”

  “I’ve got to go. I’m going, Pea.”

  Pea closed her eyes briefly.

  “Ain’t nobody making you stay, baby.”

  * * *

  She told Mrs. Grundy when she came in the next morning.

  “For how long will you be gone, Miss Anderson?”

  Tamara waved her hand. “Oh, a few weeks, probably.”

  Mrs. Grundy blinked. “Mrs. Patil is due in three weeks.”

  “I called her sister. She’ll come down to help out this weekend.”

  Mrs. Grundy set her jaw and nodded. Tamara could have slapped her. Did everyone get to judge? Even this northern peckerwood? But it didn’t matter, she reminded herself. That was the bittersweet pleasure of running up the white flag.

  Phyllis said she understood when they said goodbye. If she did, she was doing better than Tamara, who cried on the afternoon train—so relieved to be gone, so guilty to be leaving her.

  Walter picked her up from Grand Central in that silver Packard. She tilted her chin when she stepped in front of the white folks in her better fur to climb into the back seat of a better car. Walter just laughed and tipped his hat before he opened the door. Tamara caught the curious, resentful stares and smiled brighter. She couldn’t be proud of everything in her life, but at least she’d gotten where she’d meant to go: a long way from Lawrenceville, from the bloody ground beneath the hanging tree outside of town.

  “You look tired,” he said.

  She straightened her back—which had been hunched against some unconscious weight—and glared at him in the rearview mirror. “And you look nearly as silver as Victor.”

  This wasn’t fair—he had a few more white hairs among the black, but they were mostly by his temples, giving him a skunky slick-back that suited his new role at the head of the operation.

  He laughed. “My wife says I should dye it. I say it would look undignified.”

  Your wife? Tamara thought, but kept her surprise to herself. “It looks good, honestly.”

  “How’s Phyllis?”

  They were heading north on Broadway, drifting west as the sun set over the distant line of the Hudson. As they moved, streetlights flickered to yellow life down the cross streets.

  “Miserable.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Her blood pressure is better. She just has to push through. No more than a few weeks left.”

  “And how are you, Tammy?”

  She scowled. “Crummy, and I’m sure Pea already told you all about it.”

  “She said that Vic’s still paying you visits. She said that you’d been tormenting yourself with those cards and couldn’t spend any more time with her ghosts.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Walter!” She smacked the back of his seat. It only hurt her hand.

  “Talk like what?”

  “Like I’m making all this up. Like I just got tired of her…”

  And besides, were they really Pea’s ghosts? Little Sammy, Pete Williams, Aunt Winnie, her great-grandmother—hell, even Victor, if she had to say it out loud. Even Victor’s sad, puffed-up silver ghost.

  “I could understand it if you had. Our Phyllis isn’t always pleasant company.”

  A few more tears leaked fr
om the corners of her swollen eyes. Baby, what happened? she would say, if she could see her now. “She is,” Tammy said, sullen as a child. “She is to me.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  Her breath stuck for a moment, but she snatched it back. Her ragged nails dug into her palms. “I just couldn’t stand it. She and Dev … they think I’m like them. When I’m not, nothing like them!”

  “And the cards?”

  Did he know? But how could he? She only shared that with the cards and the ancestors. The choice she was making every day, even if she had refused to own it: Pea, dead in a matter of weeks. That dreaming child, growing up without a mother. She caught a sob and strangled it in her chest.

  “Don’t you think they’re just parlor tricks, Walter?”

  “You don’t.”

  “Well, they just tell me there’s no good I can do there. I’m better back here. I missed the city!” She took a deep breath of the fishy decay blowing in from the Hudson. “Hell, I even missed the stink of it! You have to tell me everything that’s happened at the Pelican. I know you’ve been following my schedule, but I haven’t even thought about the spring season…”

  She trailed off. Walter’s shrugs were always eloquent. This one smelled of disappointment and calculated silence. She let him keep it—it always amazed her how often people would rush to fill Walter’s silences. They’d say all sorts of fool things just to stop him from staring.

  Walter turned down 72nd Street and then onto Riverside Drive. She rolled up the window as he smoothly accelerated. He had told her he was taking her to dinner, but she didn’t know what restaurants he fancied so far uptown.

  “So you’re staying, then,” he said, finally. His voice was flat enough to skate on.

  “Pea made her choices! I’m sorry she’s suffering for it now, but no one can expect me to give up my own life for hers. Christ, if you could see her, ankles fat as eggplants, back twisted like an old tree, the nightmares that baby gives her that she’ll never tell me—and her hands so thick that some days she can’t make a fist but she can still make a knife dance. That baby’s made her a prisoner in her own body. Watching her makes me want to—want…”