by Deb Spera
“That’s Mr. Bootles,” I tell her. “He’s all right.”
Odell nods. “Ma’am.”
She gets to trembling so bad it’s like she’s seen the Holy Ghost himself. Then the retching begins. That’s the tea doing its job. I reach to the floor, pick up the slop jar and set it on her lap. She leans her head over it and throws up all she took in. Odell stands still as a tree in the middle of the room while I rub her back. Somewhere far off, the sky rumbles.
“Child needs a doctor, Retta.”
“No doctor is going to come out here at night, Odell.”
“Then we got to take her to him. He’ll take her in.”
“No time for that.”
“I’ll fetch Roy to help me with the horses.”
“I ain’t leaving the child with no doctor.”
I mean to keep my promise to the Lord. This child is my burden. If I save her life, I save his. The air between us is heavy.
“Old man, you got nothing to say that I want to hear.”
He turns and goes out the screen door. Ain’t nothin’ I can say that will make him understand. I rub her back and hold her hair away from the mess.
“Get it out child, get it all out.”
When she’s done, she falls against me. I lay her on the couch and rub her head ’til her breathing calms. When she finally closes her eyes, I peer into the slop jar to see what’s come up—maggots twist and float in the waste.
After I get the child to sleep and feed Odell and me, we retire to our bedroom. I rub Vaseline on Odell’s stump. His leg is one big scar from the burn of his accident. After all the years that have passed since he was so hurt, he still feels the pain like it was yesterday. He lays back on the bed while I do for him like he does for me. It don’t matter to me none he is without a leg. He is still a man. Took me a while to convince him of that, but I rub his tired body every night. He says I brought him back to life, but I’m the one that was saved by his living.
“You got to have faith, O. There’s things we can’t see. We can only see what’s in front of us, what our eyes make out. We don’t have God’s view. Could be this is a blessing. Maybe something good can come of it.”
“Woman, you are something else.”
Odell don’t understand what I know, what I seen, and I’m careful not to trouble him. Husbands don’t need to know everything. He’s got to keep his mind straight, focus on his own health. He pushes too hard as it is. He’s asleep before I can put my head on the pillow. I lie quiet so as not to trouble him, but inside my thoughts run like they’re being chased. The child’s being eaten up from the inside, and them worms need something other than human flesh to feed on. Tomorrow I got to get something of substance in her stomach that can pass through.
I am glad to be with Odell when the rain comes. It’s a summer storm, powerful but quick. He sleeps up next to me like he always does. Says it soothes his soul. But it’s my restlessness that gets calmed with his big old body next to mine. Nothing can hurt me with Odell by my side. I done what I promised I would do, but I know that promise is more than one day’s work. The child’s got no spirit left. It’s a terrible sight to behold in one so young. She’ll need some fight, and I aim to give her some while she’s in my keep. I rest my eyes for a minute. A good storm helps. The storm outside calms the storm within. I wake to a hand on my arm and the girl standing by the bed shaking like tomorrow ain’t coming. I lift the bedsheet, and she crawls in next to me, hot as coal. I sing soft ’til she calms.
“I looked out to Jordan and what did I see, coming for to carry me home? A band of angels comin’ after me, comin’ for to carry me home...”
You got to settle yourself with death. I been able to do that with everybody but Odell. Losing him would kill me. I’ve said to him more than once, “If you die first, just wait for me there, I won’t be but a minute behind.”
I wonder, though I would never say it, if I done a service or disservice to Odell by prayin’ for his life to be spared when he got hurt all them years ago. It was my need that couldn’t let him go. Mine. Not his. It’s a woeful thing to have such powerful need. You can feed on need, but you’ll always want for more. To love is not God’s hope, but Satan’s will.
Odell wakes next to me and I press against him for comfort. What a sight we must be, the three of us lyin’ in the bed. He reaches over my shoulder and finds the child’s head, and rests his hand for just a moment. Nobody died under my roof today, but somewhere a creature died. For something to live, something had to die. The redbirds promise that.
“Gonna be all right,” I tell Odell.
He lets go a powerful sigh.
Somebody in this town will have something to say before this is said and done. Nothing’s happened yet, but something will.
4
Gertrude
Alligators feed once a week, and sometimes, if the prey is big enough, they don’t need to eat for almost a year. But I don’t know how long it takes a gator to eat big prey. Daddy never said nothing ’bout that and I never asked.
I smell the storm coming from the north before it hits. Mama could always smell a storm before it come, sometimes days ahead. She passed her nose right on down to me. I smell it in the wind, a heavy sweetness, full, like something’s about to bust. Same way I felt before my time come to give birth to each of my babies. Ripe—that’s what a storm is. I got just enough time before it breaks to shed my clothes, and use what’s left of the kindling to make a fire. If I had one more dress, I’d burn the one on my back, too. It does me more harm than good as thin as it is, you can see clear through it. The sun is gone, but I got firelight to see by. I squat naked by the pump while the thunder rolls in, scrubbing away the day’s deed. I wash every part. I don’t feel the cold, though it’s cold enough to hurt. I’m past that. I will be ready when they come for me. I will be respectable and clean. I pour a bowl of cold water over my head to rinse the soap from my hair. I know what I must look like. I am an animal in the woods, not fit for proper society. No matter—even an animal has its virtue. I got a nose like a fox. And I smell what’s coming.
Mama always made us pull the mattresses to the floor before a storm hit. She was scared lightning would get us in our bed. Before she got sick, storms were the only thing I ever saw Mama throw a fit over. If it was real bad weather, she’d scream and cry every time thunder would roll across the sky. Nobody could reach her. No matter what we said or did, she couldn’t be calmed until it passed. Sometimes it was two, three days before her thoughts come back to us. Her mind wandered around back then even before it left her altogether. Daddy said it’s ’cause Papaw got hit by lightning, and she saw it happen. Stepped out on the porch to smoke his pipe and boom—like God himself reached down with His bony fingers just for her daddy. Got to wonder what sort of sin welcomes that kind of haste. It knocked Mama backward clear to the center of the house. That whole episode got caught in her head. No matter how she tried, she never could get it out. Anybody finds out what I done, they’ll say I weren’t in my right mind, but I ain’t like Mama. I know every minute of every day and where each thought is inside that time. Sometimes the years go by so fast it’s like flipping pages in a book, but a day can take so long a whole life’s gone by before the sun sets down.
Tomorrow is Saturday. Alvin’s due at the sawmill by six, and when he don’t show, his daddy will show up to raise hell. Morning will come quick. I got to get up and work instead of listening to the no-good company of my own thoughts. I got to be ready. With a candle for light, I clean what I can see of Alvin’s waste and vomit dried up on the floor. Flies and insects cover the spots in a mighty swarm of tiny creatures. Likely they’d do the task of cleaning for me, but then they’ll lay eggs and multiply. They crawl up my hands and arms, and onto my dress, biting and stinging the whole time, but I don’t feel it. I swat at them. I can kill ten, maybe twenty, in one swipe, but they always come back.
&nbs
p; The notion of food makes me sick, but I know I need the strength, so I eat a mite of corn bread Retta give me before I pull the mattress to the floor. It takes me three good heaves. Alvin used to do this for us. The story of Papaw shook him. Got to be he’d pull the beds down without me asking when storms come up. He didn’t see no eccentricity in the need to stay low. I lay my head in the middle of the bed and stretch clear across both sides before I close my eyes. I’m sick as I ever been, sick with pain and what I done. But I’m tired, too, tired for the ages. There’s sweet temptation in lying down and never getting up. Instead of prayers I speak out loud. “Mama, bless me.” I listen for her voice, what kind words she might give, for she was a kind woman. But she is gone. I’ve lost her in the wind.
My sin against Alvin is a terrible thing, I know. The Bible tells us so. But what sin is worse, the sin of living in squalor with no hope as a prisoner in the place that’s supposed to be your haven or the sin of murdering your husband? You got to be responsible for your house. That’s your job as the woman. That’s what Mama said. If Alvin weren’t happy with us, with me, then I must not have seen a clear way as to how to make him happy, but I tried even if it didn’t work. I guess I wasn’t smart enough. And if what Mama said is true, about the woman being the main one to make a happy home, then the sin of killing Alvin is no worse than the life I built for my children. I will carry it on my shoulders. I will take it and swallow it and bear it if it means a chance for them girls to live with food in their bellies. I will go to hell or jail, whichever comes first, but if they have a chance, I mean to give it to them, even if killing casts a shadow on their name.
Sometime in the night, before first light, I wake to the storm. I’ve lost sense of its direction, like the sky just gathered above and spilled all it was holding on top of me. Lightning and thunder so mixed together I can’t tell one from the other—just one big roar. Rain pounds the ground, and wind rattles the tin roof. The old house sways on its stilts. This place will be an island before long if it ain’t already. Then the swamp will bring up everything that sits inside it: gators, moccasins, bullfrogs, ticks and leeches—all of hell’s creatures.
With a lit candle I peer into the mirror to look at my face. I fear I am blind in my left eye. Even when I pry it open all I can see is the blackness of the blood inside. In the dark I fix a poultice of wet snuff and lay back down. The cool mixture soothes the throb. Alvin’s daddy will come soon. He will know what I done. He will want his revenge. I know the fierceness of the need to protect your own. I close my eyes while the heavens curse around me.
* * *
When I come to, the clock reads 5:30 p.m., and Saturday is nearly gone. My heart jumps to my throat for the time wasted. Good for nothing to waste a day lying on the bed. I step out to the front porch to listen for something human. What is left of my fire outside lies black and dead in the weeds. The footpath to the swamp is washed over with a wide pool of water. There’s no sign of Alvin’s daddy. I’ve been given another day. Maybe she heard me. Maybe Mama heard.
5
Retta
Since Mrs. Walker died two weeks ago, I sometimes catch sight of her out on the lane, usually in the early morning just as dawn comes up. I can’t say if it’s me wishing her there or something else. Sadness can play powerful tricks on the mind. I am a foolish old woman who loves a crippled man more than she should, a woman with no business having a white friend nor caring for a white child. In the days that followed my friend’s death, I saw her figure rise from the ground and take form out of the heat of a summer day. I always see straight through her, but that don’t make her any less there. She lived on that corner for thirty-five years, one block from where Shake Rag begins. I watched every day in Mrs. Walker’s life, and since her death, the women of the Sewing Circle coming along slow in a little pack working toward the miles ahead and the day ahead of that, and the specter of my friend tugging alongside them just like she used to in the living world.
But not today, today she is standing in the pouring rain looking tired and bedraggled. I notice her there when Odell and me load the wagon along the side of the house and settle the child in the back. I can see her from the yard standing in the center of the road—mud gathered about her hemline. Today she ignores the passel of women walking to work. Today she is watching me.
I prayed for Mrs. Walker before and after she died. I can’t reconcile with a God that don’t help you know you’re gone. Where is the promise of life everlasting? I can’t make sense of what’s happening, but I mean to have answers to my questions when it comes my time to go. Oh, the questions I have. I wish I could bury them in the side yard with my baby girl, but they plague me. I swear if I don’t get the answers I want after I get to heaven, I will turn around and go.
Mrs. Walker gave me all her chickens ’fore she died. Every one. She even signed a paper saying it was her wish I have them so nobody would accuse me of stealing. She brought me them chickens one by one, six in all. She loved them, even gave them names.
“This here’s Georgia,” she said handing over one of the laying hens. “She’s nervous and likes to be talked to. If you don’t wish her a good morning, she won’t give you eggs, so you talk to her, you hear?”
She brought five fat chickens and a rooster: Georgia and Kentucky, Florida and Mississippi, Alabama and a scrawny old banty rooster named Sugar.
I asked once at her kitchen table, “Why you name that rooster Sugar?”
“I believed if I named him sweet and treat him sweet, he would respond as such.”
“Lord have mercy,” I told her, “you can’t change the nature of a beast any more than you can change the nature of a man.”
“Can’t say that ’til you try.”
“Did it work?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Can’t always stand to the side, Oretta. Sometimes you got to try to change what you don’t like.”
She saved Sugar after some old boys left him for dead at a Saturday night cockfight. Found him in the field off the side of the road on her walk home from church and nursed him back to life. It didn’t matter what she called him or how she cared for him, he stayed mean. And don’t you know she loved that old rooster all the more for his bad temper. Got a mess of chickens from him, too. He was up on those hens every chance he got.
I knew it was serious when she brought me Sugar. Put my heart right up in my throat. I told her I’d be happy to care for them chickens if she needed. I said she could say what she would but I wasn’t keeping them. I’d just hold them for her ’til she wanted them back.
“No,” she told me, “I can’t be no burden to you, Oretta. You got enough on your shoulders. They’re yours now. You do as you see fit.”
She didn’t want to be no burden. No burden—nothing extra to carry. A white woman didn’t want to be no burden to me. I never heard the likes of that. A week later she was dead, and I wondered what she carried in her that she knew about and never said aloud.
The street this morning is littered with workers scattering to get to wherever they’re going in the rain, under newspapers, jackets and umbrellas to keep from getting wet. Firemen and porters off to the train station, the good women of Shake Rag with their heads tied up in scarves off to clean, the white women of the Sewing Circle stepping through mud and leaping over puddles as they walk the miles beneath their feet. It’s Saturday. Every one I see will put in a full day of work before we rest on the Sabbath.
The child lay on a quilt in the back of the wagon, under a canvas Odell rigged to keep her dry. She’s too sick to walk. She come through the night, but her fever’s strong and she’s still not eaten. I hold the umbrella high to cover Odell’s head while he worries with the reins. He cannot get them settled in his hands. The rain calms to a drizzle by the time we are out of the yard and onto the road. I finally put my hand over his so he’ll know to stop fussing, and I feel hi
s tremor. He pulls away and holds the reins like he always does in his right hand, but his fingers are white about the knuckles from clinching so hard. By the time I get my mind cleared enough to remember, I look up to where Mrs. Walker stood, but the horses are upon, then through her. She disappears in the summer rain.
Heads turn to watch us as Odell and me ride down the lane and through town. I am glad to have the rain as excuse not to speak. By the time Odell hauls the wagon around the back of the Coleses’ house by the kitchen door the rain’s stopped. The child stands in the wagon when I call her. I hold Odell steady while he lifts her up and over the side. She squeezes her eyes shut until he puts her in my arms. She lays her head on my breast. I could be carrying an armload of cotton if I didn’t know better, for she’s no weight at all. Odell uses his crutch to steady and push himself back up onto the wagon and takes the reins once again in his hands.
“Where you headin’?” I ask.
“I’m going to drop a line in the Edisto. Fish ought to bite today.”
“You up to it?” I ask.
“Up to fishin?” He shakes his head like I’ve gone crazy, turns the straps of leather over in his hand and stares straight out to the fields alongside the house. Six weeks ago these fields was full of tobacco and men, women and children sweating in the hot sun to get it harvested.
“Get inside ’fore somebody sees,” Odell tells me.
“We done nothing wrong, Odell.”
“That child don’t belong in this house.”
He looks at me and I stare back.
“You wanna take her with you?”
He lets go of a breath and snaps the reins against the old mare’s backs ’til they go steady out the yard and down the road.
I lay the child in the room off the kitchen where I sleep when Miss Annie needs me to work late on occasion. The same one I lived in after Mama died. Miss Annie put a lock on the door for me all those years ago, then handed me the key.
