One More River

by Mary Glickman

  Out you go, he said to his lover, pinching her bottom playfully as she left the car, laughing as she squealed and turned around to slam the door at him. He watched her smooth her skirt and enter the house. He drove off, whistling, thinking all was well as well could be.

  Neither of them noticed the tail end of the Lincoln Continental parked far up the winding driveway that ended behind the house. Mickey Moe could be excused for not seeing it. It was 90 percent out of his line of sight, and he was on a mission to get them started on the way to Memphis. His preparations were where his focus lay. But Laura Anne should have seen. She should have caught at least a glimpse of the vehicle out of her peripheral vision and would have if her head hadn’t been full of wedding dresses and banquet menus and childbirth and tilling soil. If she had, she might have been prepared when she crossed the threshold to hear the dark hiss of a familiar voice.

  So that’s the kind of boy he is. Drops my daughter off in the street like she was somethin’ common. Well, I suppose it’s what she deserves.

  Daddy!

  Another voice, icy cold, chimed in.

  You lied to me, young lady. Your people had no idea where you were staying, only fears and dark suspicions. I am going to have to ask you to leave with your daddy immediately.

  Laura Anne faced the great hulk of an outraged Lot Needleman on her left and to her right Beadie Sassaport Levy in highest dudgeon with her arms crossed over her breasts, her chin drawn in, her face scrunched up as if the sight of her future daughter-in-law was a disgusting mass of decaying organics. Daddy grabbed her arm and held it tight enough to make her wince. He held her hatbox suitcase in his free hand as if he’d been waiting in the vestibule for his moment like an armed robber hiding behind a roadside bush.

  You comin’ with me, gal.

  She wriggled, she wept, she cried out, she protested, she twisted to look back and begged Sara Kate, who peeped out from around the door of the next room, for help. Of course, that woman had no power in the matter. Frankly, she didn’t care much about the troubles of white people she barely knew apart from the gossip value, which was why she was peeping, or if she could give Beadie a headache, but this event was far beyond the scope of her meddling. Eudora Jean was nowhere to be seen.

  Lot Needleman hustled his daughter and her luggage out the door and into his car. He locked the doors and drove off while she pounded with helpless fists on the window, saying over and over, I’m twenty years old! You can’t do this to me! You can’t! You can’t! I’m twenty years old!

  It didn’t do any good.

  At a stoplight, she tried to jump out the car, but Lot pulled her back. He sped off before the light turned green to keep her in. He drove with one hand and kept the other wrapped tight as elastic bands around her forearm. By nightfall, she was badly bruised. Once they were outside Guilford and speeding along Highway 61, there was no opportunity to get away, and Laura Anne calmed down some. She whimpered a while, then blew her nose. For the rest of the ride, she worked to overcome her daddy’s determination to keep her home and separated from the love of her life. She turned sweet and apologetic.

  Daddy, she said. I am very sorry for alarming you and Mama. I would not have done it in a million, trillion years, except that I know you are wrong about my Mickey Moe. Please don’t blame him for my lack of respect for your wishes. He didn’t know I was coming to him. Surely Miss Beadie told you that.

  While she said this and many other things, some true, some not, she put her hand on the back of Lot Needleman’s neck, the way she did when she was a little girl and he drove her to the playground or Bible class. He started to melt.

  You know, Daddy, he’s on the very cusp of finding out who his daddy was. It’s incredible. After all these years, he’s found a clue up in Memphis that could clear everything up once and for all. And when he does that, Daddy, when he can tell you who his very fine people are, will you promise me that you’ll accept him? Will you let us be together? Because if you do, Daddy, I promise, in return, to stay with you and Mama until that day. I will not cause another moment of distress for you. I will be cheerful. I will be industrious. I will be your good and darlin’ daughter. . . .

  She promised a number of other things she would be, all designed to maneuver herself back into his good graces. Slowly, the hard set of his jaw softened. She won his promise. He’d give Mickey Moe another try soon as he knew his blood. Her vows proved as ephemeral as morning mist. She tried. She tried to be good, but it didn’t take a week before her lovesick mind fancied one escape route after another. In each, she met Mickey Moe in Memphis or wherever else he might be along the course of his quest, and her flight was funded by the whole of her bank account withdrawn in cash and fueled by the power of a free woman’s love.

  IX

  Saint Louis, Missouri, 1925

  THE THREE OF THEM SAT on the front porch of a warm night in March, smelling the green damp scent of woodlands coming awake to grow again. There were many stars alight in a big band that stretched rainbowlike over their heads. Every now and then, several would shoot across the sky. It was a natural time for making wishes.

  I wish I could travel, Horace said. It would be good to get away from the cousins for a little bit.

  The other two agreed.

  Oh yes, Aurora Mae said.

  Uh-huh, echoed Bernard.

  Wouldn’t it now? Sometimes, I swear, they about to make me go insane. All that wranglin’ between ’em. The gossip and the backbitin’. The nip-nip-nip at the heels . . .

  Hmm-hm . . .

  You know it.

  I wish I was handsome, Bernard said. He cast a sly look at Aurora Mae, hoping she would protest that handsome was not that important in a man, that character and the desire to work hard were. She was silent.

  A night bird called its mate. A new star shot past. Aurora Mae spoke up.

  I wish I could get me a sweet little dog.

  At that moment, there were three dogs sitting on the porch. None of them was small, and none could be described as sweet. Mangy mixed-breeds they were, eighty pounders with fuzzy yellow teeth, fleas, and bad breath. They roamed the farm at will, guarding its perimeter, keeping their own brand of order. They were more absent than present on any given day, pretty much useless in terms of keeping watch or company at the big house. Bernard thought they all belonged to the dogs more than the dogs belonged to them. In that respect, Aurora Mae’s need for something cuddly and devoted sounded justified to him. He squirmed in his seat thinking about it because nothing makes a lover happier than finding a way to deposit delight at the feet of his beloved. Horace asked his sister exactly what kind of sweet little dog did she dream about.

  Oh, some kind of lapdog. One of those dogs with big eyes that sit at your feet pleadin’ with you to pick ’em up. I believe the purebreds would cost a fair bit though.

  She laughed.

  Who would sell a Negro such a creature anyway? Oh, I’d be happy with any kind of soulful little mutt.

  Then she looked at Bernard. Their eyes met and lingered in conjunction until each felt hot under the skin.

  Horace scratched his wooly head with one hand and covered a yawn with the other. I do think I’ll go on to bed, he said. We got to get up before dawn to work at the mill the morrow, and maybe old mighty mite here can handle that place with hardly any sleep and half a breakfast, but I surely can’t.

  He kissed his sister on her cheek and left the two alone. Not that he was looking for trouble, but he wondered how long those two could keep from consummating the feeling they had for each other. Bernard was pure besotted with Aurora Mae, he knew that. Whenever he and Bernard worked together, side by side, at the mill or the graveyard or wherever they happened to find day labor in tandem, their conversation was mostly about her. Bernard Levy asked him questions from dawn to noon about their childhoods, going all soft and trembly whenever Horace resurrected something funny or touching to relate. They’d break for lunch and eat whatever Aurora Mae packed for them, and then th
ey went on ’til dark. Bernard asked him a pile of “ifs” that varied each time. If Aurora Mae could have a dress of whatever color she pleased, what color would it be? he’d ask. Or, if Aurora Mae could sleep until any hour she chose, what hour would it be? Naturally, Horace found it irritating and dangerous, a white man showing interest in his sister, but Bernard won his heart over time. Besides being a generally pleasant companion, he taught Horace how to read and gave him books, starting with that anatomy book from his riverboat days, but magazines, too, ones he bought at the millhouse store, Life magazine and magazines about true crimes, hair-raising stuff in both cases, especially to a backwoods man of color in that time and that place. He felt grateful to Bernard, no matter how much it rankled to feel gratitude to a white man. Horace felt amused by him, too, with his curious courtly ways, that ignorance of matters he thought white men came swaddled in from birth, things like arrogance and the worst offhand cruelty. It helped that Bernard got all colored up working side by side with him in the out of doors. There were days he looked as dark as any of the half or quarter bloods around. Horace almost forgot he was a white man.

  Almost.

  It helped, too, that Bernard considered Aurora Mae an angel of some kind, untouchable, existing only to be served. It helped he was a small, wiry man, just a button of a man, really, a man his sister could swat to his knees with one hand if he bothered her.

  At the end of the day, he knew his sister had feelings for Bernard, and sometimes that worried him. She had her reasons, mostly because she was lonely. When they weren’t begging her for help, the cousins feared her and kept their distance. Other black men thereabouts called her Woodwitch or Big Time for her healing powers and her size, but it wasn’t in a respectful manner. There was ridicule in it. Bernard was present, and Bernard was smitten. That must have gone a long way with her. For the life of him, he didn’t understand why those two didn’t knock together the way they should, whether he approved or not. It wasn’t as if anybody around their little parcel of Missouri would find out if they did. They were as isolated as a body could get up there on the farm, surrounded by family, trees, and the river. Unless the cousins kept them apart.

  Horace paused in pulling a nightshirt over his head. It hung off him like a poor child’s ghost costume for Halloween. He sat that way, drop-jawed, inhaling and exhaling his way through a variety of unwholesome conjectures about where the jealousies of Cousin Clyde or the avarice of Cousin Frances Marie might lead until a round wet spot blossomed at the shirt’s center. Later, he tried to sleep, but the wet spot made him uncomfortable ’til it dried out.

  The next day, by chance, one of Cousin Clyde’s little children came up the back door at breakfast looking for one of Aurora Mae’s powders for his grandmama’s breathing troubles. Horace shooed him away empty-handed as he was cranky and sleep-deprived, angry in general at Cousin Clyde for betrayals the man had not yet committed nor for that matter contemplated until that time.

  On the way to work the next morning, Horace saw Bernard carried over his shoulder a bundle on a stick, jaunty as a pirate’s parrot. Once they were out of sight of the house, Bernard told Horace to go on without him as he had business in the town. He might not make it back that night, depending on how things went. Saint Louis was a fair walk away, and the road he needed to travel was populated mostly by black folk. There wouldn’t be an abundance of cars or even mule-driven carts along the way. It was unlikely someone would give him a lift.

  What you got goin’ on, man? Horace asked.

  Bernard’s close-set eyes crinkled with mischief and mystery and he said, A surprise.

  Horace let it go. A man’s entitled to his own business, he thought. His sister frowned to see him come home alone. When he couldn’t tell her where Bernard was nor when he would be back, she snapped at him over the way he chewed his food. She sat up ’til the wee hours, too, pretending to make up orders for her medicines by the light of an oil lamp as if pestilence were about to sweep through the neighborhood like marauding kluckers. Horace knew her stockpiles were in good order. There was no reason for her to be working late like that, except she wanted to be looking for Bernard.

  Oh, there was something between them, alright. Maybe he was naive to think it was a pure thing, unconsummated, a thing of the spirit. Horace wondered if there were secrets flying about his house, phantom passions barely glimpsed, whizzing through the air like bats in the night.

  No, he decided. No. It couldn’t be. He shook himself head to toe to let some sense in. Neither one of ’em could fool me.

  He was asleep long before Bernard got home around first light. Aurora Mae went to bed in the kitchen, because it was a hot night, she said, although it was passably cool. When she heard Bernard’s footsteps, she went to the door and sighed with relief that he was in one piece, chipper even, given his springing walk, his big beaming smile. She opened the door with one hand to let him in. Something squirmed around inside his shirt.

  What you got there? she asked. You catch me a squirrel for supper?

  Bernard pulled out a puppy, a tiny Cavalier spaniel, its soulful eyes and long, sweet ears the biggest things about it. For you, my lady, he said with a sweeping bow, popping the dog in her arms. She squealed, then gave Bernard a short, gracious hug. The top of his head barely reached her clavicle. He shared his brief nuzzle in paradise with the little dog she cradled between her breasts. The puppy licked his nose. He didn’t care. It was the happiest moment of his life so far.

  Where’d you get that dog? Horace asked as they walked to work.

  I had a plan. It didn’t pan out, then I had a stroke of luck.

  Do tell.

  Alright.

  Bernard paused for effect then plunged into his story with gusto. He drew it out where he could, made it short and snappy where necessary, and imitated voices. He was more entertaining to Horace than Saturday night revival hour on the radio.

  First thing I did was go to the river, to a spot I know close to the town but suitable private for what I wanted. It was a hot walk. I got there long enough after sunrise to bathe in the river without too many insects feastin’ on me. There was no way I was gonna walk into Saint Louis with the day’s dirt all over me. I don’t know if you noticed that bundle with me this mornin’? My city clothes. After the river bath, I laid out on some rocks until I was dry and changed into ’em. Left my work clothes up a tree. I slicked down my hair, spit-shined my shoes. Topped off with a boater. From a distance, if you squinted, I looked as dashin’ as any river dandy, you can count on that.

  When he got to the outskirts of civilization, he went straight to the docks, boarded the first gambling boat he came across, and strolled about the deck with a confident familiarity of such places. He tipped his hat to the back of his head. As a protection against pickpockets, he kept his hands deep in his pockets where he fondled the five dollars and thirty-nine cent that represented his life’s savings. He picked out a gaming table, intending to double his stake to achieve the grand sum of ten dollars, which he figured was what a fine pup like the one Aurora Mae wanted would cost. When he strode up to the Great Wheel of Fortune, he was supremely sure fate would be kind. He slunk away six minutes later utterly broke and convinced he was cursed beyond measure. One thing for certain, he could not return home empty-handed.

  He made his way to the part of town where shops for every type of luxury item could be found, whether lace, silver, buttons, threads, hats, chairs, beds, pipes, or pets. He stood in front of a pet store window where a load of puppies frolicked together and caged birds chirped around them like cheerleaders. He sized up everything he could see through the window: the chipped countertop, the dirty windowsills, the stray clumps of fur, feathers, and pellets littering the floor. Alright, he thought, alright. A new plan came to him. It wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the worst and it might work out. It was worth a try, anyway.

  He went into the shop and thanked God a woman was behind the counter. She looked at him quizzically, with almost a smile o
n her face, a middle-aged entirely forgettable woman with mud-colored hair and rust-red eyes. He took a deep breath and called upon all the fast talkers and gamesmen floating around in his blood to help him out here, help his ugly self the hell out here. He needed to charm this woman into giving him what he wanted, what he needed so bad. Primary among the solicited was his daddy. On the love you once bore for my mama, Harvé, when she was a good girl who cared for you alone, help me find the words I need to make this woman bend to my will.

  And his daddy, along with all the other great, dead river men of his people, complied. For ten minutes, Bernard leaned on the countertop and chatted up Miss Loretta, the owner of Buck’s Pet Shop. He professed his dearest love for animals of all kinds, particularly little lapdogs like that cute-as-two-buttons-in-a-row puppy over there. He bemoaned the loss of his savings on the pleasure boat, fool that he was, as one thing his daddy’s helpful spirit whispered in his ear was that a little bit of truth was the anchor to every successful pitch, and that was his. He suggested to Miss Loretta that her place was in need of some cleanup—not that he faulted her housekeeping, but the cleanup required was heavier than a lady should do. Surely she was a widow woman, he could see that, in need of a man to help out some. He told her that in exchange for one of those pups, he could make her place shine as if it were a new-minted penny out of Denver. Within ten minutes of walking through the door, he got the job of sprucing things up. The puppy was all but a few drops of sweat away from being his.

  He gabbed for all he was worth while he worked, engaging Miss Loretta in small talk. Once she opened up, he offered her truckloads of empathy as she related the tale of her dear husband’s death two years earlier.

  He was a good man, who knew all about every kind of critter you could imagine, she said, from bugs to snakes to chickens all the way up the ladder to that prince of beasts, the dog. He was an expert breeder, groomer, and trainer, and built up his business from scratch. Before he died, she bragged, there weren’t a huntin’ man along the Mississippi who didn’t know the name of Dudley Buck. Why, people came from as far away as Lake Charles, Louisiana, for a look at his stock. Imagine that, she said, people seeking dogs long-distance when there were dogs of every sort available on every square foot of Delta you can name. That’s how talented Mr. Dudley Buck was. Then, one day, on a Sunday, he jumped into a confrontation one of his bitches was havin’ out the back with a rattlesnake, and he met his end accordingly. Things hadn’t been the same since. Oh yes, I need a man to help out, she said. I’d pay quite well to keep one, too. Look what happened to this place since his death, she continued, as if Bernard had been around all along and wasn’t simply a down-and-out stranger who’d wandered in the door hankering for a pup. It was a shame, an awful shame, wasn’t it?