When Naomi opened her eyes, they landed on Henry’s coffee cup and the stained red work rag he had wiped his mouth on at breakfast. She pulled herself upright and lifted the mug, considering the heft of it and willing herself to throw it. Instead, she carried it to the sink, washed it, and set it in the dish drain.
She needed air, but the window above the sink was painted shut. She swept three dead flies from the sill into the basin. Their bodies stood out stark against the white enamel until she turned on the faucet and sent them spiraling down the drain. She went to the refrigerator and let the cold spill out around her. The waste didn’t matter; like everything else, the thing ran on free gas.
Inside there were three eggs, one piece of ham, a wedge of waxed orange cheese, and the quart of milk that came every three days. She went over to the pantry. She shifted a can of pears, a shriveled carrot, and two small potatoes to one side. In the middle of the shelf, she grouped the baking powder, a box of salt, the mostly empty sack of flour, and the tin of lard. On the right, she straightened a half-empty bag of dried beans. Three days’ worth of food, maybe four if she skipped a meal or two.
She thought about distracting herself with the laundry, but she didn’t feel like it, not yet. She went into the hall, and saw that the door to Henry’s room was ajar. She pushed it partway open with her foot and walked in. The room was bright with light from the bare window.
There was a Bible on the nightstand, the same kind that Pastor Tom had given to Beto last week after his baptism. Black leather with gold-edged pages, each one thin as a bit of onion skin. Henry’s was open to Psalm 77. Her eyes fell on a phrase: Thy footsteps are not known. The bedcovers were in a tangle, and there was a greasy spot in the middle of the pillowcase. Sourness rose into her mouth. She thought about swallowing it back down, but instead she spat. Before she walked out, she looked for the small glob of saliva glistening on his pillow. Probably it would dry and he’d never know it had been there. Or else it would be something new for him to read.
BETO Beto chased Cari up from the river, racing through spots of light and shadow as the summer sun poured through the trees. At the edge of the woods, they flung themselves down in the pine needles and waited for Wash to catch up. When he came into view, Cari leaned her head against Beto’s and whispered, “Our best find yet.”
On the rest of the walk home, Wash told them jokes and they laughed until their happiness was the loudest thing in the woods, louder than the tree frogs or the squawking grackles in the treetops. Then they came out on the oil-top road that ran along the Humble Oil camp and turned onto the packed dirt road that led to their new house.
Naomi was on the back porch waiting for them. “Ya llegamos,” Cari shouted. She ran up the steps with Beto following after.
“Talk English,” he called, mostly to show Naomi he remembered the rules.
By the time Wash strolled into the yard, they had pulled Naomi down the porch steps. She still held her sewing in one hand.
“Too hot for laundry?” Wash asked.
Naomi frowned. “Didn’t get to it.”
“Ask us something,” Beto said to Naomi, yanking on her sleeve.
Naomi made a face like she was thinking hard. “Did you catch anything?”
Wash pulled his hands from behind his back to reveal the two strings of fish they’d caught. Five fish on each string. Fish fooled by bits of worm stabbed onto hooks. Cari had delighted in that job, but Beto had looked away, unsure about the whole business until they pulled in the first fish. It thrashed hard at the end of the line, its scales lit by the sun. River bass, Wash had said. River silver, Beto had thought. Even now that the fish hung still and straight, they gleamed in the late afternoon light.
“Nice little bass. Not bad for the first try,” Wash said.
Naomi nodded and put a hand on Beto’s elbow. “What do you say?”
Beto glanced at Cari. “Thank you,” they said together.
“Y’all know how to clean fish?” Wash asked.
“Soap and water?” Beto ventured. He blushed as soon as he said it.
Wash laughed. “Not hardly. Come on, let me teach you.” He looked over at Naomi. “Can you spare two dishes and a good sharp knife? We’ll get these cleaned and ready for frying.”
“I already made dinner,” Naomi said.
“Fried sand bass go good with everything, I promise.”
“All right,” she said.
WASH Wash set the bowl of scraps on the edge of the back porch and handed Naomi the other bowl, now lined with neat filets. She thanked him and sent the twins inside to wash up and set the table. “I’ll be checking on you soon,” she called.
They hollered good night to Wash and ran up the steps. The screen door banged behind them as they went in, and their laughter grew faint.
“They had fun,” Naomi said. A smile escaped her then. Wash watched it transform her face into a fuller beauty.
“What?” Naomi asked. Her smile vanished.
“You figure on a better way to get your groceries?” He lowered his voice. “Mr. Turner can be downright unkind. Old man gargles with the devil’s mouthwash, you ask me.”
“We’re fine,” she said, but the wrinkle in her forehead was back. All Wash could think was how bad he wanted to find a way to put a smile back on her face.
“Listen, there’s a store in Egypt Town. Mr. Mason sells to everybody. Mostly it’s us shopping there, plus backwater folks that’s shy of town and only come around couple times a year. Anyway, you won’t have to wait at Turner’s back door for him to try to pass off his worst stock on you. I’ve seen him sell moldy potatoes back there and dare folks to complain about it.” He hooked his thumbs through his belt loops, then pulled them free. “I can take you over to the store tomorrow if you want.”
After a long pause, she nodded. “Please.”
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“What do you mean?” she asked. She pressed the bowl to her apron and stared at the ground. He thought he saw color in her cheeks, but it might have been the light.
“Never mind,” he said. “See you tomorrow in the woods by the school? I’ll find you all.”
“All right. Good night,” she said.
“Evening, Naomi.” Wash lifted his hat and waved, but Naomi was already on her way up the porch steps.
◊ ◊ ◊
Of course, Wash knew better. Knowing better came with being the son of the black school principal, who was also Egypt Town’s de facto mayor. It came with singing in the AME choir and taking Sunday school attendance. It came with paying Booker, speaking proper, and polishing his father’s shoes. It came with “yessir, yessum” for Mr. and Mrs. Turner and the other white folks he crossed paths with. On the side of knowing better were his mother and father, all the teachers he knew, the deacons from church, Booker T. Washington, and the diligent faculty of the Tuskegee Institute. Knowing better had its secrets too, like the tin of condoms Wash’s father had given him, saying, “I don’t want you messing around. But if you do, think of your future.”
Better was a safe place. Better was what you were supposed to do. That’s why better was better. Better was big enough to include Rosie Lynn Horton, who sang soprano in the choir and had slightly mismatched nipples on nutmeg-brown breasts that were otherwise perfect. (Wash knew because Rosie didn’t spend all her time singing in the choir.)
But Wash wasn’t thinking about Rosie Lynn anymore, and he wanted to know Naomi more than he wanted to know better.
BETO After school, Beto waited in the woods with Naomi and Cari. Most everybody who was walking to the Humble camp had already gone on. Some of the kids from the revival came toward them in matching dresses. An older girl was with them, someone from Naomi’s class named Tommie. When she saw Naomi, she invited the three of them for snacks.
“My ma made some applesauce cake,” Tommie said. “Might be some lemonade, too.”
Beto and Cari tugged on Naomi’s sleeves, but she shook her head.
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p; “Maybe another time,” she said, giving them a hard look. “Thanks for the invitation.”
Nobody said anything until the girls were far down the path.
“Could’ve eaten cake, too, for how long it’s taking,” Cari said. “When is Wash coming?” She swatted at her damp curls.
“Don’t know,” Naomi said. “If you want, you can fix my braid.”
Cari sighed and rolled her eyes. A moment later, though, she came over behind Naomi, undid her braid, and began to redo it. At home, sometimes Naomi let Beto fix her hair, too, but he couldn’t ask for a turn out here.
“Want to know what we learned today?” Cari asked.
“Of course,” Naomi said. She reached out to push a few sweaty strands of hair off Beto’s forehead.
Cari said, “I read ‘ACKERMAN, FRANCIS,’ ‘ACKERMANN, RUDOLPH,’ and ‘ACNE.’ Blech, that one was nasty. I sure didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help finishing it.” Then she named the good entries, sometimes telling whole long passages she knew by heart.
Beto was a good reader, too, but he couldn’t remember things the way Cari could. For him it was bits and broad outlines, never the perfect whole.
She was mostly generous with her gift. Like today, when he had wanted to keep the entry on the albatross, she had agreed to read it. All that it took for them to have it forever was for Cari to read it once. Sometimes Cari would tell him bits at night if they were both awake. And during the day, too, if he agreed to give up something in exchange or do her some favor.
Halfway through Cari’s recitation of an entry on astrology, Wash came jogging up the path from the direction of the school. “Y’all ready?” he asked. He pulled a wristwatch out of his pocket and checked it. “Sorry I’m late.”
Naomi nodded, and they followed him into the woods.
After ten minutes on the main trail, Wash pointed to a smaller path to one side. “Egypt Town’s this way,” he said. The place sounded like magic. Beto and Cari tore down the path because if a place was worth walking to, it was surely worth a run.
“Turn right at the road,” Wash called.
On the road they passed a half dozen brightly painted houses, some tidy and some not, and then they were in front of the only thing that looked like a store. MASONS was painted in big white letters straight onto the shingle siding of the building, and it had a wide front porch with a few homemade rockers. The front door was propped open with a barrel.
Inside, Wash introduced them to Mr. Mason, the owner, who had gentle eyes and shaky hands that reminded Beto of Abuelito. A few stray white hairs stuck out from his chin. He greeted Naomi with a “Good afternoon, miss,” and gave Beto and Cari a broken peppermint stick apiece. Naomi went over her list, and Mr. Mason brought down the items she asked for from his shelves and cabinets. Beto and Cari squatted at the counter, eyeing the big glass jars of candy and figuring on what they could get for the dime Naomi had given them.
Once their candy was picked out and Mr. Mason had scooped it into a paper bag, Wash led them back out onto the porch so that Naomi could finish her shopping. They played a while and sucked on their candy until they were down to just one piece of red licorice. Beto wanted to be sure Naomi got some, so he darted back through the open doorway to give it to her. Mr. Mason was talking to Naomi somewhere in the back part of the store.
“...good people here in Egypt, but maybe you should think about shopping elsewhere.”
“Mr. Turner didn’t want me in his store. I’d have to go clear to Overton, almost five miles,” Naomi said.
“You’re sort of ... in between. You keep comin’ here, that’s fine. But see to it that you don’t get too familiar with ... folks.” Mr. Mason walked over to the counter then, and when he saw Beto, his face seemed to change, to go stiff somehow, and he smiled. “Got one more scrap of peppermint if you want it.”
“Please,” Naomi said, “save some for other children. They already had plenty.”
Mr. Mason nodded slowly, and then after counting and recounting, he reached across the counter and dropped some coins into Naomi’s hand. “There’s always someone looking to make talk.” He spoke softly, but Beto still heard.
THE GANG Most of us couldn’t like the Mexican girl on account of Miranda not liking her, which made it downright dangerous, socially speaking. But Tommie Kinnebrew was near evangelical on the subject and spent half her talk trying to win us over. Mary Ellis said that the Mexican girl went to Tommie’s church, which was why she was obliged to like her.
We would be sitting at lunch in the cafeteria or eating under one of Mr. Crane’s big trees that only the seniors were allowed to use, and Tommie would barge in and force some dull story down our throats about how the Mexican girl was such a hard worker. She let some interesting facts slip along the way, though. She told us how the girl didn’t have a mama, poor thing, and also didn’t know how to do her wash. She’d learned that tidbit from Muff Clarkson, also a member of the New London Baptist Church. Muff stopped by to bring the girl’s family a cake and found her up to her elbows in laundry—in the bathtub of all places. How come? The true-fact answer was that she didn’t know how to use a crank wash machine since she was poor as all get-out, and we reasoned that she had not even lived in a real house but had slept with horses or pigs back in some nasty corner of San Antonio, a town we knew to be full of dirty Mexicans. According to Tommie, when Muff told her that she’d never get that red clay out by slopping things around in the tub, the Mexican girl burst into tears.
Tommie’s stories weren’t much, but they gave us material for working up something better. The boys among us liked to think on how the Mexican girl surely got wet doing the laundry. Word was that she didn’t wear a slip; just a splash of water and you’d see damn near everything. The girls among us focused on the obvious fact that a Mexican girl who didn’t know how to do laundry had to be just about the most unsanitary creature on earth. That was proof that Mexicans were filthy, they said. You might get a disease just by standing near this one, and you surely did not want to share a sewing machine with her in home economics. The girls on the homecoming committee said, “See?” The boys on the football team shrugged and grinned. In the locker room during the second week of football practice, Forrest Evers said that he’d gone all the way with her out back of the cafeteria. We didn’t believe him, but we liked the thought of it.
There were other questions, too, like what the relation was between her and the little white kids that she watched and also between her and her “daddy,” who plain as day was not her daddy. A few of us decided that she wasn’t a Mexican at all since the little kids weren’t brown. The explanation was that her mama was white but there’d been a nigger in the wood stack, which was where the girl’s color came from. That story was told mostly by those who thought she shouldn’t be in our school but instead ought to be out learning with the coloreds, but there was pushback from folks who insisted that she was a Mexican and that it was hardly fair to make a Mexican go to the darkie school.
Besides, we didn’t want to lose her. She was the only pretty thing that every boy among us believed could be his, at least ten minutes at a time. Without her, we’d have nothing to talk about but football, Miranda’s new charm bracelet ordered from Dallas, Chigger Watson jacking off in the woods, and who was finishing the year out and who was going to get married or go work the rigs. Without the Mexican girl, the only stories we’d get from Tommie Kinnebrew would be about Oklahoma and the last oil field her daddy worked and how they had to share a one-room garage with another family. “Didn’t have nothing to separate our smells and sounds except for a big blanket tacked up in the middle,” she told us more times than we wanted, which was none.
We needed the Mexican girl, each in our own way. She gave us something to do. She kept us thinking. How to get rid of her (Miranda); how to stay clear of her (the other girls); how to get in her (the boys).
NAOMI Naomi started when the screen door swung open. She looked down. Her hands were drifting in the gray dis
hwater, long gone cold. She could not say when she had finished the dishes.
“Daydreaming?” Henry said.
“Just cleaning up. I didn’t hear you come in,” she said. She pulled the stopper. “Kids are asleep. There’s fried ham and beans. Potatoes and creamed corn. I can warm it for you.” She uncovered his plate.
He tossed his hat onto the counter. “Don’t bother. I’ll eat it cold.” He rolled up his sleeves and began to lather up with the bar of Lava soap.
“Where’d that come from?” he asked, pointing a soapy finger at a small boat Wash had made for the twins. One of them must have left it there when they washed up for dinner.
“Oh, the kids made a friend.” She wiped her hands on her apron.
“Colored boy?” he asked over his shoulder.
“That’s right,” she answered. She laid a fork and a napkin on the table.
“Bud said something to me about seeing a Negro boy pass by.” Henry ducked down and splashed a little water on his face then rubbed himself dry with a dish towel. She made a mental note to put that one in the laundry bin at the first opportunity. “Seems like they ought to be making friends with kids at their school.”
“They are,” she said. “Kids from church, too. I saw Cari eating lunch with Cassie and Janey Horton today, and Beto was playing football with some boys.”
“That’s good. Better for them to stick to their own kind. Not that I’ve got anything against coloreds.”
She might have said “yes, sir,” and left it at that. But then she thought of what Wash had given her. Not just a way to get the groceries but also relief, warmth. That afternoon on the way home from the store: light angling through the trees, cicadas clattering high in the branches, the twins racing and laughing with Wash, her not needing to say anything. She felt the worth of it, and a bit of boldness sprouted up in her.
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