by Deb Spera
“Oh, I’m glad He has not!” Odell cries from across the room. Big ole tears stream down his face, and just as quick I am crying, too, for Odell, for my husband, for this man who is a man among men and for my own sorrow for I see now my terrible error. I am rooted to my seat in shame. I have doubted the man who has never doubted me.
Gertrude
“Where is the father of these girls?” Reverend asks.
“He ain’t with us no more, but my brother, Berns, and his wife, Marie, stand by our side.”
There’s no cause to question what I say, and the Reverend don’t.
“I need to ask you a litany of questions and you need to answer yes or no, and I hope you will say yes.”
He says the last part like a joke and the people laugh. This Reverend is new enough to still be happy about his work.
“Do you believe in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?”
“Yessir.”
“Do you believe Alma and Mary are gifts from God?”
“Yessir, I do.”
“That’s two yeses.” He laughs. “Hallelujah!”
“Hallelujah,” the people answer.
“Do you promise to teach and train your daughters in admiration of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?”
“Yes.”
“And to the aunt and uncle of these girls, if by chance their mother falters on this promise, which she has made before God, do you promise to take these children up and train and teach them in the way of admiration of our Lord God?”
Berns and Marie agree.
He cups each of his hands in a bowl of water a deacon has brought forth and lays the water on the girls’ heads. They jump from the cold of it.
“By the power vested in me by our Lord, Jesus Christ, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
“Amen,” everyone says.
We turn to face the people who smile at us for all the hopes of good fortune to come. In the back pew sits Mrs. Barker. Her husband ain’t here, but she’s got both her boys alongside her. Next to Harlan, at the end of the row staring straight ahead at her sisters, is Lily. She looks at me, her eyes round and scared, but I look away. She’s cast her lot.
Retta
“Sometimes,” Preacher says, “Jesus will seek you out, because He has a purpose for your life. You know what I’m saying?”
Folks laugh through their tears, Preacher laughs, too.
“Awwww, He’s coming after ya. You’ll be tired of hiding. You can sit high, or you can sit low, if He wants to find ya, He knows where to go. Huh?”
“That’s right,” we call back.
Preacher whispers, “Ya’ll listen, this is for the believer now. All of us are reaching, but we are not reaching with expectation. We stretch out to God, but we are not looking for nothin’ in return. When God came to Thomas the doubter, He said to him, I want you to put your finger in My hand, your hand in My side, and feel the power of the resurrection. The power of what you are called to believe. ’Cause I can’t use you if you aren’t a believer. If you don’t believe what I tell you, you can’t be My preacher.”
“Amen!”
“If you don’t believe I have a plan for you, you can’t be My witness or My songstress or My healer.”
“No, sir!”
“You can’t reach out if your arms are folded, you got to extend out of your circumstance, extend out of your hurt and pain. God can use you.”
Feet stomp and hands clap. Dust rises from the floorboards and floats in the air like tiny stars in the bright sun. Any notion of heat has left us. We’re clay in God’s hands now, standing in unison, like a wave looking for shore. We know the power of God.
“And when they walked my Savior to a hill called Calvary, they hung Him on a cross. They stretched out His hands, huh?”
“Yes, thank You, Lord.”
Everybody knows what Preacher is telling us. Everybody knows what God had to do to His son, His only begotten son, such a terrible thing to give up a child. Odell and me know how terrible. We know.
Lost in the rapture, Preacher’s tears mix with the sweat that pours down his face. He tells us, “God showed everybody on the hill that terrible day who asked the question how much does He love us. He stretched his arms out wide to show us how much.”
“Yes, Jesus, yes.”
“He stretched. He reached. In full capacity ’til He couldn’t reach no more, and that’s when they put the nails in His hands.”
I cannot stay still no more. I leave my bench and reach for my husband. He sees me coming and stretches his arms out for me. The room is filled with the Holy Spirit.
“I believe in you, Odell, I believe in you,” I whisper to him.
Odell brings his arm around me and kisses the top of my head. “I know, I know.”
I’ve come home to my husband, and he has forgiven me. We stand side by side, me to his left, his crutch on the right, but he is the one holding me up.
Preacher mops his brow, then asks all of us, “You wanna know how much He loves you? Stretch out your arms.”
And we do, Odell and me, all of us. We do as we’re told.
20
Annie
I am wide-awake. Well past the midnight hour I lie in my bed clutching the blankets despite the heat. I need them to hold me down, otherwise I might float out the window and into the night sky. I know what I am bound to do before I rise, though my actions will do no good, offer no comfort. I’ve had a full weekend of so little rest, every waking moment feels like a dream. Reason has left me.
No matter how I try to resist, in my darkest days the barn always beckons, and I am compelled to face again and again the thing I hate. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve wandered alone to that dreaded building in hopes of a single clue, a morsel of understanding. For the first month after Buck died, I slept there every night despite Edwin’s protests. I asked Edwin to add electricity to the barn when we put it in the house, but he refused, worried my request might reignite my ritual. In one small hour of one insignificant day, everything I held dear was destroyed. I wasn’t a good mother, that much is fact, but I was the only kind I knew how to be.
This morning the men took leave and the relief I felt has been replaced by deep discontent. Over and over, back and forth my brain plays Buck’s death and the incessant fights with my daughters; over and over I look for a scrap of knowledge to understand what went wrong. Nothing good can come of my imaginings of what might have been. I wrap a blanket around my shoulders and walk like a nomad through the desert of my own home.
I visit the boys’ bedrooms and sit on the bed where Lonnie, just last night, slept. His scent lingers on the pillow. My memory of him and Eddie as boys has faded so significantly I doubt I was ever witness. There is a time and place for memories, and old age is where they often come to reside. I used to gather them one after another, thinking, I won’t forget, I won’t forget. But it is the details that leave first and in their wake is only the one big moment. Maybe it’s a year or five years, maybe a day, some terrible day, but beyond that all the details fade. What’s left is a wave so big it smothers. Children are such a wave, the birthing and caring and rearing. When you’re in the throes it all seems interminable. Then, whoosh, it’s over. I don’t know why I was surprised when the children grew up, but I was. I thought, in their youth, it would last forever. Now I see that it was my youth, not theirs that was speaking. The past is now and now and now.
In bare feet I wander down the stairs, the cool wood beneath my feet, and retrieve in the kitchen, above the stove, a box of matches from the shelf. The kitchen door creaks when I open it. I leave it ajar for I won’t be long; besides there’s nothing here to protect. The moon weaves in and out of black clouds against a dark blue sky. Nighthawks float silently amid them. Light and moving shadow make every inanimate object appear frozen in
time: the old well now boarded up, no longer in use, the root cellar and its wooden door carved into the hill like an army bunker, the plow with its glistening blades, another relic, under the old cherry tree. I move through space like a figment of my own imagination, but even that’s not true. There is no imagining here. I’ve taken this walk many times, always alone, always the same whether day or night, wishing, praying, for back then I did pray, for a different outcome. Though the ritual has changed, this walk, this barn, is my penance.
Though older, the building is markedly different on the outside. It had to be reconfigured to cure the tobacco. I remarked to Edwin that the missing slats gave the impression of disassembly when he first began reconstruction. “Are we coming or going?” I asked. Initially, I was glad to see a differing appearance as if somehow that would change what I remember, but to no avail. The barn still looms large on our land, perhaps never more profoundly than now. Or maybe this profundity is simply a reminder of what’s always been here growing like the dandelion, impenetrable grief. Hack at it, dig it up, burn it even, it always comes back.
Edwin’s hunting dog comes running from his kennel up by the barn, barking the entire way. He halts when I hold out my hand in command and sits while I turn to see if anyone has stirred in the house, forgetting no one is there, then heels as I continue. Before I slide the barn door open, I snap my fingers and he lies next to me. Despite the emptiness, the smell of ripe tobacco permeates as if the scent has seeped into the wood. This building holds many memories: mine, Edwin’s, the children’s. For Edwin, memories of his childhood, for me, in the early years of marriage it served as haven from the eyes of watchful parents, and for my children? I can’t know their memories, but their brokenness and absences speak volumes.
I extract a match and strike it against the emery alongside the box. It catches flame with a whoosh, and I hold it in front of me to illuminate the spot I seek. The excuse I gave myself for years after Buck’s death was I was young and inexperienced with children. I had no mother of my own to learn from. As if that forgave the transgression of not seeing clearly my own child’s pain. When he stopped sleeping I thought it a phase, something that would shift back to normalcy. Under the illusion my notion was right, I believed Buck would comply, as children ultimately do. Children are supposed to grow up, get married, have babies of their own and share their lives with us. Buck changed that. Buck was the catalyst for everything.
I lay the matches along the dirt where I found my son and with one lit match, ignite the whole box. “Here, Bucky,” I whisper. “Here is your light in the dark.”
It catches like a miniature bonfire. An owl streaks across the rafters, settling in the far corner, gold eyes staring at me. I kneel in the dirt beside the flames. This is where I found him, lifeless at the end of a rope. He was too small to stand atop anything to jump from, so he tied a rope to the inside door in a clumsy noose, then knelt and leaned into his last breath. Such a deliberate act; at any point he could have changed his mind, stood and walked away—twelve years old and already weary of the life he had with us.
It’s a terrible thing to lose a child. Many women endure it and many more will long after I am gone. Some become weak and frail from such a blow, but not me. I became hard, as if a layer of armor grew over my skin—some impenetrable ancient alligator.
The flames that ignited with such fierceness falter in the absence of kindling until finally I am left in the dark. I place my hands in the dirt where I found my small sensitive boy, my meadowlark who sang and danced when he was young, before he turned silent, and rub them until small pebbles are caught and lodged in my palms. I am bleeding when I come to recognize the futility of my examination. By the time I walk back toward home, the clouds have swept over the moon and the sky has shifted into total blackness. Our house, clear and vivid only moments before, stands in muted shadow. There will be rain tonight. The dog leaves me at the door. I stand at the kitchen sink washing my hands, watching him trot back from whence he came. He disappears from view like he was never there.
In the top drawer by the sink are scissors Retta uses to cut the chicken for frying. She keeps it sharpened. I remember how I taught the children to carry sharp objects all those many years ago.
“Hold them away from your body, children. Never run, they are dangerous.”
The parlor is dark but my eyes adjust. I have lived in this place for fifty-four years, I could be blindfolded and still know every nook and cranny. The telephone wire is easy enough to find in the dark. I pull it taut in one hand then make the cut that connects us to the outside world. Such a tiny thread, it’s much easier to snip than I imagined. I return the scissors to their home, pour myself a glass of water and climb the steps. Back in my own bedroom, I mix sleeping powders with the water and swallow—just enough for one night. I will sleep until the thoughts quiet. Until daybreak.
III
21
Retta
Dear Odell,
There’s been a long two weeks of quiet and we’ve heard no word from you or Mr. Coles. If it took five, maybe six days to get to Florence and another three for the selling of tobacco, then you’ve got to be on the road home by now. I put you coming up the lane by late September. That’s my arithmetic and that’s my prayer.
The sound and smell of you is absent from the yard, the kitchen, our bed. In your place is a loud quiet. Ain’t that an odd thing? Whoever heard of a loud quiet? Not me, not ’til now. It ain’t just your voice that’s gone, Odell, there’s a whole choir full of voices missing. Since you been gone, feels like everybody’s left me all at once. No matter how much I sit by her grave, I forget what our Esther’s voice sounded like when she called my name, the high pitch of Mrs. Walker’s laugh over something she thought funny, Mama fussin’ over my worry. Nor can I see the signs that were once present to me. Mockingbirds cry all day above the din of other birds, into the fall of darkness and again before the sun awakens. The wind comes and goes in gusts with no pattern or reason. Only the smell of autumn riding its coattails promises something, but what I cannot say. The scent of pine is so strong, it’s as if my memory leapfrogged over autumn and landed on Christmas. But no matter how I try, I can’t see the Christmas that’s coming. Instead, I watch your face in my mind’s eye as you read my letters. With every word I write, the memory of you grows stronger, so I write this letter and more so I can hang on to that picture of you, and imagine your voice in reply. Come back soon, O.
Love,
Oretta
The spot where Odell sleeps is cool, such a relief from the heat of my body in the sheets. Strong winds have come. Long past the midnight hour I am awake again, in our bed listening to the rustling of trees. I always forget how when a season gives way to the next there’s always a fight. Now the winds have come to blow the last of summer away.
What’s that? There it is, steady and getting stronger. Horses’ hooves, two or more coming toward Shake Rag. They turn up through the lane and into our yard. They’ve come for me. I sit in fear to rise, for they are in a terrible hurry to tell me something. The raps on the door are strong, each in rounds of three: boom, boom, boom, the fist of a man, no, of two men.
I rush to open the door, but this news has brought me something altogether different than I expected, though I should have known what was coming. Nelly’s daddy stands in his overalls breathing with the heaviness of a man who’s hurried from a great distance. A young white man I ain’t never seen before steps off the porch and into the wind. He is wiry and trembling, with a cleft mouth. The ridge from his nose down through the bottom of his lip is so wide I can see his teeth. He wants to speak, but nothing comes out when he opens his mouth. Maybe he can’t talk, I don’t know. Nelly’s mama is supposed to deliver her baby. There ain’t no cause for them to be here unless there’s trouble. Nelly’s daddy is a man who speaks mostly Catawba but he knows some English.
“How fast is the pain coming?” I ask.
&n
bsp; “Ain’t stopped.”
The white man is frantic in the yard, turning in circles.
“What do you mean it ain’t stopped?”
“It’s come and taken hold.”
I worried for this. I tell him to stay put and I’ll be out directly. The white man makes a loud noise, but no words attach to it. Look how upset he is with me, upset I ain’t coming now, this minute, with only my nightdress on.
“Who is this?”
“Nuwá’s betrothed.”
The man comes and stands by Nelly’s daddy. I had forgotten Nelly’s Indian name, Nuwá. Been many years since I heard it. I gave her the name Nelly when she told me her real name. She was fourteen. I knew Mr. Coles wouldn’t have no savage in the house, so I told her she needed to answer to Nelly and she has, but Nuwá, that’s her real name. It means daughter.
Though the need for hurry is clear, we can go no further ’til a truth is said to this white man.
“Son, if you are to be of any help to Nelly, you got to simmer down.”
I hold his eye and don’t let go until he calms himself. Only then do I go inside and go about my business. We got to hurry, but I also got to think. The book Mama and me made that’s got notes from all the births we oversaw is laid on the top shelf of the closet. I can just reach it from my tiptoes. Ain’t no scarf that can hold down this old gray hair, but I tie one on anyway. The wind will have its way no matter.
Nelly’s two weeks out from where she’s supposed to be. That’s good. The baby will be formed proper. But there were signs I worried for. She needed to be off her feet more than she was. Just this week I tried to get her to stay the night at Miss Annie’s house in my room off the kitchen so I could see to her, but she said no, and there weren’t no amount of threats that could change her mind. What’s done is done, no use thinking about that now. I got to stay with the task at hand. When I step out and close the door behind me, Roy is in his pants and suspenders out on the lane doing what he promised Odell. He’s learned of Nelly’s trouble.
