Out of Darkness

by Ashley Hope Pérez

  Wash tossed the shoe between his hands. “If I can’t get you down, I’ll leave you to your thinking. I’m Wash, by the way, Wash Fuller. What’d you say your name was?”

  “Naomi.” He thought he could see those pretty red lips moving, but he couldn’t be sure.

  He poked around in the underbrush until he found a long, sturdy stick. He balanced the shoe on the end and raised it up to the branch. A hand reached down, and for a second Wash saw that sweet face again. Also smooth arms and a long dark braid hanging down over one shoulder.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you and your shoe, Miss Naomi.” He lifted his hat to the tree.

  The only answer was the swishing of the leaves.

  BETO Beto stroked the top of the desk he shared with Cari. It was smooth as a church pew. Not a single scratch or initial. While the other kids finished their sums, a thought floated between the twins: what did they think of Miss Bell?

  They had had prettier teachers and younger ones, too. Miss Bell looked like an untinted photograph of a teacher, all pale skin and black hair and black dress, lips gray and puffy as the worms that sometimes ended up in the big jugs of tequila that their uncles in San Antonio brought from Juárez. A birthmark on her throat peeked up over the high collar of her black dress.

  Beto wondered if Miss Bell liked him or might come to like him. That was something Cari would never waste a thought on. Their last teacher in San Antonio had dipped her fingers into Cari’s curls at least once a day. She was always saying things like, “You sweet thing, I could eat you right up!” But if one of the Gutierrez boys so much as sneezed, she’d pin her lips into a line, slap him with the ruler, and tell him to stay home if he was going to be nasty. Teachers weren’t mean to Beto; they hardly noticed him. When they did, they seemed to be studying the gap between what he was and what he should have been: a real twin, a double of Cari.

  The black sail of Miss Bell’s dress appeared at Beto’s side. He kept his eyes on the floor while she checked their work. She tapped a finger on each answer before setting their slates down on the desk. Then he watched her flat black shoes go up the long aisle to the front of the room. A moment later, she was back, and she set a fat red book with gold lettering in front of Beto and another one in front of Cari.

  Beto’s book was Volume 1 of the 1917 World Book. It had tidy columns with block letter headings and drawings on nearly every page. And there were hundreds and hundreds of pages. It would not run out in an hour like the ripped and soggy mystery magazines he sometimes fished out of the garbage bins behind newsstands near Abuelito’s shop. It wouldn’t bore to death, either, like the dull primers they were used to at school.

  He started with AARDVARK. The name meant “earth pig,” and the book said that a “sharp blow with a stout stick” was all it took to kill one, if that was what you wanted to do.

  “We like her, don’t we?” Beto whispered, his finger holding his place.

  Cari nodded once, then went back to her own reading.

  WASH When Wash pulled the front door closed behind him, he kept the knob turned so the lock wouldn’t click too loudly. Inside, the cover was down on the piano, and the hymn-book was closed. Usually Peggy practiced until Ma needed her help for dinner. Already cooking smells were drifting from the kitchen. It was even later than he had thought. He should never have let Cal talk him into that detour to the creek, girls or no girls.

  “Wash?” his mother called. “You come in here.”

  He strolled into the kitchen, hands in his pockets.

  “What you using the front door for?” Peggy asked. She balanced her paring knife on a neat pile of turnip peels and put her hands on her hips. A lot of nerve for a fourteen-year-old with buckteeth and a weak chin.

  “Free country,” he said, tossing his hat onto a chair.

  His mother shot Peggy a disapproving look. “Why are you using the front door. Wash, you use complete sentences, and pick up your hat.”

  “It is a free country,” Wash mumbled. He reached for the hat and put it on a hook by the back door.

  “Now you, Peggy,” Rhoda prompted.

  “Wash, why are you using the front door?” Peggy rolled her eyes at Wash, but she did it so that their mother couldn’t see. Rhoda Fuller had been a schoolteacher until the state started making laws to free up jobs for unemployed men. One was that a woman couldn’t be employed in the same school district as her husband. Wash’s father was already principal of the New London Colored School, so that was the end of her teaching. Now she stayed home. Mostly, she looked for ways to make extra money and hassled him and Pegs.

  Wash was sliding toward his bedroom when Rhoda said, “No, sir. Empty your pockets right here.”

  “Ma,” Wash sighed.

  “Don’t ‘Ma’ me. You pay Booker first thing, as always.”

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  When Wash was ten and Peggy was seven, their father hung two empty frames on the wall in the living room, one to the left of his own Tuskegee diploma, one to the right of their mother’s. “This is where your college diplomas will go. That’s what you’re working for. Don’t you forget it,” Jim told them.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Rhoda inspected his earnings, counting out the four pennies and three nickels twice to make sure before she looked up, eyebrows raised. “Is that all?” She clucked her tongue as all but one coin clanked into the tin with the rest of that week’s Booker money. “A whole day you’ve been out and you don’t have anything more to show for it? It makes me wonder if you’ve been working or loafing around with Cal. That boy is lazier than a slug in summer.”

  “Come on, Mama. Mr. Crane is paying me tomorrow when I finish the painting. I did a little work for the Waters family out that way, but then Mrs. Bourne caught me and had me chop her firewood again. You know how she is.”

  “I hope she paid you.”

  Wash shook his head. “She tried to give me a bucket of buttermilk. First off, she knows we’ve got two good cows. And it was the middle of the day to boot. I couldn’t be lugging that bucket all over with me. There was no time to bring it back here even if I wanted.”

  “So what’d you do?” asked Peggy.

  “Reminded her of our cows. And when she still wouldn’t take the milk back, I poured it out right there and gave her the bucket.”

  “Wash!” Peggy said, her mouth hanging open for a moment. “Did she light into you for sassing?”

  “Oh, she fumed a little and threw her bucket down. That’s all.”

  His mother laid a pot on the stovetop and turned to face him. “You be careful. That woman is so tight she can barely sit down, but that doesn’t change a thing. What would your father say?”

  “I’m not aiming to tell him,” Wash said.

  She gave him a hard look. “I’m as serious as sin, son.”

  Wash thought on it for a second, then puffed his cheeks out, lowered his eyebrows, and worked wrinkles into his forehead. He rested one hand on an imaginary belly and raised the other in the air, waggling a disapproving finger. Wash deepened his voice and gave it the gruffness and urgency that were his father’s signature. “I know she’s a cheat, son. But that’s how it is. You can’t show your anger. Never show your anger. Otherwise you give them power over you. You don’t have to look for trouble for it to find you. Remember the Mississippi turkeys.” Wash stifled a chuckle and pressed his face back into character. “Remember, son, when it comes to whites, ‘yessir, yessum’ is the only answer you know.”

  Peggy giggled, and a smile twitched at the corners of his mother’s mouth. “All right,” she said. “I’m persuaded. Those turkeys were no joke, though. Got a man lynched, understand? You steer clear of Mrs. Bourne from now on even if you have to go out of your way.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Wash answered, all earnest now.

  “And I hope it puts you in the way of some better-paying work,” his mother said. “Now go clean up. You can set the table.”

  He kissed his mother on the
cheek before picking up the lonely nickel that was left for him to spend as he pleased.

  NAOMI Naomi wiped her hands on her apron and lowered herself into a kitchen chair, wishing for Henry to be at work so she didn’t have to sit through a meal with him. “Let’s say grace,” he said with his born-again smile. He stretched out a hand to the twins on either side of him; at least she was spared touching him. “Thank you, Lord Jesus, for this food. Bless it to our bodies. Amen.”

  It was over before she remembered to close her eyes. Cari hadn’t closed her eyes, either, but she did it on purpose, staring up open and bold at the ceiling. Or maybe at God beyond it. If anyone could look Him straight in the eye, it was Cari. Beto kept his eyes closed tight for a full second after the prayer ended, and Naomi saw that he held on to Henry until Henry pulled his hand away and started serving his plate.

  Henry forked up a slice of ham from the platter and dribbled a glob of lumpy pepper gravy onto a biscuit. Naomi watched and waited for a complaint. She’d never cooked this kind of food before, and it showed.

  “So,” he said, “how was the first day of school?”

  Beto told him the class was small, not even forty kids. All the students had their own seats, and no one had to sit on cigar boxes like they did back in San Antonio. That put a satisfied smile on Henry’s face. Cari rounded out the description with an impression of their teacher, who sounded formal but kind. She’d given them something called a world book, and then somehow Beto was talking about a pig that ate ants.

  Naomi stopped listening and stared out the window over the sink, which pointed straight at the neighbor’s kitchen window. A heavy-set woman was trying to wash a bottle with one hand while she balanced a red-faced baby on her hip.

  When Naomi looked back, Henry was looking at her. “How about you?” he asked.

  She shrugged. Who knew what would happen once she actually went to the school. The enrollment card with the name Naomi C. Smith—not her name at all—was still inside the pocket of her dress. Henry had taken away the twins’ names, too, registering them as Robbie and Carrie, never mind that her mother had named them Roberto and Caridad in the days before she died. When Naomi asked him about the names on the cards, he’d waved her words away. Nobody would ask for a birth certificate here, he said; people were in and out of the school all the time because of the oil field. It would be simpler, he said, to have everybody enrolled under the same last name.

  “Smith” was a slick, faceless thing, a coin worn smooth. Maybe that was why he did not understand that carrying a name was a way of caring for those who’d given it. Naomi Consuelo Corona Vargas. That was her name. She closed her mouth hard around it. Let him handle the silence. Let him decide what to do with it. She stared out the window and watched the dusk turn the white of the neighbor’s house pale purple, then gray.

  “Y’all got the stuff unpacked right quick,” Henry said.

  Naomi nodded. There hadn’t been much to unpack. But she could still feel the handle of her mother’s guitar case in her hand as she slid it under her bed, way at the back toward the wall. Not that she could hide it from Henry; he’d seen her put it in the back of the truck in San Antonio and then had handed it down to her again in East Texas. She guessed he recognized it, but she couldn’t say for sure.

  Maybe he’d been too busy gloating over the twins’ delight at the neat little oil camp house with its running hot water, electric lights, and fancy appliances. They’d run from room to room, flipping light switches, turning on the taps, bouncing on the beds. It might have been brighter and more modern than the cramped space they’d shared with their grandparents in one of the San Antonio corrals, but for her, the house was too full of Henry. Every fork and spoon and glass in the place had touched his lips. His shaving things sat on the shelf in the bathroom alongside the same aftershave she remembered from years earlier. She saw an oily handprint on the kitchen wall and a wadded handkerchief on the couch in the living room.

  “What’s for dessert?” Henry said, cutting into her thoughts. “You kids want some dessert?”

  Naomi frowned and went to the pantry. She found a can of fruit cocktail and spooned it into three dishes. She divided the sweet syrup then used her fingernail to split the cherry into two bits for the twins to share. They began eating as soon as she set the bowls down in front of them, but Henry cocked an eyebrow. A moment later, he slid his bowl across the table to her. She thought about pushing it back, but instead she got up to do the dishes. She was only here to watch out for Cari and Beto; she wasn’t about to take anything from him if she could avoid it.

  She ran the water hot, filling the sink and leaning into the steam. The twins were slurping the last of the syrup from their bowls when Henry’s spoon began to clink against his dish.

  HENRY Henry had brought the twins to East Texas because his pastor told him to. Told him in words about lost sheep and duty. Told him with a hard stare from the pulpit. Told him down by the river. Told him gentle and told him mean. Told him till his ear was full again with Jesus and promises and a calling, but still Henry held back. He tried to explain about the accidents, about his bad luck, but each time Pastor Tom cut him off, called it evil superstition.

  “Jesus is calling on you to act,” he shouted to Henry over the drilling equipment one day after his shift ended. “Bring ’em home.” Tom steered him down one of the rutted work roads, his hand a sweating brick on Henry’s shoulder. He talked and preached till Henry wore down and said, “I’ll see about it.”

  Henry hadn’t really meant it, but when the words were out, feeling rose in his gut. He felt, briefly, like a boy straining over the handlebars of a borrowed bicycle, cresting a high rise, flinging himself into the downhill.

  The preacher yipped and jabbed at the sky with his fraying Bible. “You can triumph in Jesus’ name!”

  “In his name!” Henry answered, hands trembling. A second swell of excitement grew in his belly. Sweat slid down from his armpits and back, soaking the waistband of his pants.

  “It won’t be easy now,” the pastor said. His eyes shown bright in the twilight, full of the challenge he was calling Henry to, full of the promise that Henry would meet it.

  “No, I reckon not,” Henry said. Already, though, he was picturing himself walking his bright, clean children up to Pastor Tom during an altar call, sunlight coming through the windows, the choir singing, the whole church looking on.

  After Pastor Tom prayed over him, Henry drove straight to the Humble Oil work yard and went to the boss’s trailer. “I need a place for my family,” he told Graham Salter, the man whose good luck Henry had followed through the oil fields since he was sixteen.

  Salter looked up at him with weepy gray eyes. He stubbed out his cigarette on a bit of scrap metal.

  “Since when have you got a goddamn family?” Salter said. Then he held out an application for the Humble Oil Company housing.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  For the first time in years, Henry wrote letters to the kids’ grandparents in San Antonio. He described the church and the landscape. His work. He watched for bits of news that might sway Estella’s parents. He saw an article that talked about special classes in the new school that had just been built in New London with tax money from the oil companies. The kids got band instruments, sports uniforms, and new books. There was even a football stadium with electric lights. The reporter said that New London had built the most expensive rural school in the world. Henry clipped the article, folded it into thirds, and mailed it.

  Henry’s days were long with work and waiting and wondering if he had done enough. A house came open in the Humble camp, and he had two weeks to lease it or not. He wrote again and sent along a drawing that a little girl at church had made of her house in the Humble housing camp, which was the same as the one Henry could get, which was the same as all the others.

  He took his hat off in church and rested it on his knee. He did not know if he was hoping for the kids to come or hoping for them to stay away.

>   A letter arrived in July. The grandfather wrote that the twins could come, but only if Henry took in the older girl as well. She was nearly grown and would help look after them.

  For years Henry had worked not to think of her. When he did, he remembered a skinny brown girl with sad eyes, sharp teeth, and a mouth full of Spanish. He remembered her dark face in the rearview mirror just after he’d married Estella and moved them to Houston, a face as long as the braid down her back. Serious, suspicious, watchful. In the beginning, she’d been a bit of baggage from Estella’s first marriage, a shadow at the edges of his happiness. Later, she’d been a brief, disastrous solution. When it was all done and Estella was dead, he wished he could bury her with her mother and so be free of the shame of it.

  Now she would be a reminder of all the mistakes he had made. No, not him; the fallen man from before. The man who had died so that the Henry he was now could be born. The Henry that was putting a family back together. The Henry bound to make his Savior and Redeemer proud.

  The week before he went to get his children, Henry mopped the floors of the house with vinegar and water and laid out the sheets and blankets he’d bought. On the drive down to San Antonio, he ate sunflower seeds until his belly ached, spitting their woody husks into an old paper cup. He tried to pray but stalled out a few words in each time.

  He held a handkerchief over his nose as he drove down a dusty, crowded San Antonio street. He thought he was going the right direction, but there were no house numbers. The place was packed with lopsided row houses patched with tin sheets and scrap wood and cardboard. Boxes of garbage and piles of junk were heaped around wrecked porches. Dark faces looked out at him from dirty windows.