The Book of Peach

by Penelope Stokes J.

Back toward Main Street, carillon bells rang out on the morning air. It was First Methodist; it had the sweetest bells in Chulahatchie. I put down my pen and I listened for a while, the tune as familiar to me as my own name:

  “Come home, come home . . . ye who are weary, come home. . . .”

  The music seeped into my soul and triggered a long-buried memory.

  Homecoming.

  One year in late spring—I was perhaps eight or nine—we took a trip back to Tennessee, to Bell Cove Presbyterian, out in the country near Clarksville, for what Mama called a “homecoming.”

  “Homecoming” at Bell Cove Pres was less a church gathering than a family reunion for the Bell clan. “This is part of your heritage, Priscilla,” Mama told me with pride. “This is our church.”

  By “our church,” she didn’t mean the congregation we belonged to and attended on a more or less regular basis. The Tennessee Bells didn’t belong to the church; the church belonged to them. Bell Cove Presbyterian had, quite literally, been owned by the Bell family and its heirs, well into the twentieth century.

  The original Bells had built the sanctuary themselves, right on the Bell Plantation, using slave labor and hand-fired bricks. The Bells held the deed to the land and the building. The Bells made the decisions about what would transpire within the church’s walls—right down to Bell approval for each new minister, and the vote condemning one hapless organist to unemployment because he was suspected of being what my grandmother GiGi called a fancy man. “Queer fingers,” she said, “have no place on a Bell organ.”

  The Bell family—which meant my great-grandmother and her sisters, along with GiGi and her cousins—had held on to ownership of Bell Cove Presbyterian until the eleventh hour, when pressure from the national presbytery at last prevailed. In 1935 the building had finally been released, with great reluctance, to presbytery control, but not before it had been placed on the National Register of Historic Places and marked with a huge plaque in honor of the original Bell family and their offspring.

  My first glimpse of the ancient house of worship brought a swell of pride to my childish heart, pride that was quickly replaced with confusion. It was a rectangular building of red brick, with a wide front porch and square white columns. A simple, elegant, thoroughly Southern church, but with one baffling feature. High on the upper level, where a second-story verandah might have been, hung two narrow white doors. No steps, no way to get up there. Just doors, closed and locked.

  I drew my father aside and asked him what they were for. In the old days, he told me, there had been a balcony in the church, now long since torn down, and outside stairs leading up to the mysterious doors. “That’s where the slaves went in for church,” he explained. Into the balcony from the outside of the building, with no access to the main sanctuary.

  He said it with pride, as if the Bells, in allowing their Negroes into the building at all, had struck some kind of primal blow for civil rights. All I could think of was how eerie the doors looked, hanging there in midair like they had been lynched and left to die.

  No black faces joined the worship that homecoming Sunday, although I heard a few of the ladies talking, as they spread a feast on the tables that lined the tree-shaded grounds, of how their “girls” had labored all week to produce these pies and cakes and fried chicken and casseroles. After dinner, while the women gossiped and the men pitched horseshoes, I wandered out back, down the hill behind Bell Cove Presbyterian, where the cemetery dated to the early eighteen hundreds.

  I saw my family’s name on nearly every tombstone: Claudia Stone Bell, who died at age four of scarlet fever. Ronald William Bell, of the First Tennessee Regiment, who fought bravely in the conflict and expired at age twenty from the wounds of war. And smaller markers, too, in the perimeter among the weeds: Sassy and Marcus, Brownie and Rooster Joe. And one that struck me with the force of a physical blow: Little Peach.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at that weathered stone with its two simple words. I don’t know how many times Mama had to shout down the hill before I heard her, calling that the homemade ice cream was ready and I should stop being antisocial and come play with my cousins.

  All I could hear, in the breeze that rustled through the cedar trees around the cemetery, were the low echoes of Negro spirituals, rising on the wind. Slave music, the kind of songs Molly-Faith Johnston sang in my grandmother’s kitchen as she went about her work and planted within me the suspicion that I might be linked to her by blood as well as heart. Songs of a faith that I knew, instinctively, went deeper than my mother’s concept of religion as social acceptability. Songs of hope. Songs of freedom. Music long silenced at Bell Cove Presbyterian by those tiny, weatherworn markers in the church cemetery.

  Someday I would learn those songs and sing them for myself.

  Someday.

  Mama mighta been the one in the pew, but I think I was the one who went to church. Right there in my striped pajamas on the back verandah, drinking coffee and writing in my journal.

  Until I wrote it, I hadn’t remembered all that about Bell Cove Presbyterian and the cemetery and my feelings about seeing my name on a slave child’s tombstone.

  I’d forgotten a lot, it seemed. Being back at Belladonna stirred the pot and brought up all sorts of memories. Memories and dreams and longings I’d pushed down or covered up or lost along the way. I had lived my life the way Mama expected, trying to please her, trying to be the person she wanted me to be. Then I married Robert and simply adopted his set of standards and expectations.

  I flipped back a few pages and reread the words I didn’t understand:

  I don’t want to live this way anymore.

  Something moved inside me—a seismic shift of the heart, an invisible earthquake—and at last I understood. I had never declared my own emancipation. Not from Mama. Not from Robert. Not from my own spinelessness.

  In forty-five years I had never sung those freedom songs for myself. Not a single note.

  And it was about damn time.

  PART TWO

  Unfolding

  How do I know what I think

  until I’ve written it?

  How do I know

  what I believe

  except by trial and error,

  exploration

  and discovery?

  How do I know myself

  until I find the courage

  to break open my soul

  and be known

  by another?

  11

  Spring came and went, and by the time June rolled around, it was clear we were in for a sweltering Mississippi summer. The kind I hadn’t missed one bit since moving to the more temperate climes of the Blue Ridge.

  My mother was not at all pleased with my newfound emancipation. Not that I expected her to be. I had given up makeup and taken to roaming around town in old cutoff blue jeans and ancient T-shirts. Looking, in Mama’s words, like some middle-aged hippie, showing her toes in sandals—but, Lord have mercy, no pedicure.

  “For heaven’s sake, Priscilla,” Mama said, “would it kill you to fix up a bit? Just a little dab of lipstick, even. Don’t you care what people think?”

  Fact was, I didn’t. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t concerned about my appearance, my image, or other people’s approval or disapproval. And it was incredibly liberating.

  “What difference does it make?” I said. “Nobody recognizes me anyway.”

  “Now, that’s God’s honest truth,” Mama muttered under her breath.

  She left for her bridge club without saying another word, but I knew what she was thinking. I was Priscilla Rondell, golden child of Chulahatchie, the beautiful little girl who had grown up to be Soybean Queen, Miss Ole Miss, and second runner-up to Miss Mississippi. Besides that, I was a Bell of the Tennessee Bells, and a Bell woman would sooner go out in public as naked as Lady Godiva than be seen without her face and hairdo intact.

  When the door shut behind her, I exhaled relief. I had survived these mon
ths by keeping my distance from Mama, and she from me. We had settled into an uneasy truce: I had no place else to go, and she had no one else to criticize.

  Mama and me—the perfect dovetailing of neuroses. Each morning we go our own ways, and each evening we sit down to supper and sparring.

  Or so I’d like to think, if I could rewrite history to suit myself. The closer truth is, she strikes, and I turn the other cheek. Just as I’ve always done.

  Why can’t I stand up for myself? Wearing cutoffs and T-shirts isn’t exactly taking a stand. It’s simply pushing her buttons. It irritates the hell out of her, and I know it, so I do it. But it doesn’t make me more of an adult, more of an equal (as “sparring” would imply).

  How did I get here? Where did this habit of submission come from? It’s not my nature—or at least it doesn’t feel like my nature. Yet when I look at my relationships, not just with Mama but with everybody close to me, I can’t deny that I’ve spent my life trying to please.

  Trying, and failing.

  Trying harder, and failing more spectacularly.

  This was exactly the kind of self-examination my old fool of a therapist had hoped for, exactly what he’d applaud. And so, perversely, I didn’t give him the satisfaction. During our weekly telephone session, I hemmed and hawed and mumbled when he asked what I’d been learning, and then I listened to him go on and on about how important it was for me to be using this time to full advantage. For eleven solid minutes he ranted, practically without taking a breath.

  I timed him, and later I deducted it from my check.

  I’d been holding on by my fingernails for months, all the way through the spring and summer, and I was sick and tired of it all. Sick and tired of being stuck here with Mama on my back all the livelong day. Sick and tired of hearing what a disappointment I was. Sick and tired of feeling like a failure with no hope and no prospects.

  Sick and tired of being sick and tired.

  I need for something to happen, I wrote in my journal. Something. Anything.

  And then something did.

  12

  The Heartbreak Cafe wasn’t the kind of restaurant Mama would set foot in, not if her hair was on fire and that battered aluminum water pitcher held the last douse left on the face of the earth.

  And to be perfectly candid, it was the lack of Mama that made the diner nearly perfect.

  The cafe was pretty much what you’d expect from the name—not dismal, exactly, but certainly, ah, vintage. Or at least that was the impression the place gave off when you initially walked in. Once you got used to it, it wasn’t so bad, really. It smelled deliciously of bacon and coffee and cinnamon apples. Not fancy, by any stretch of the imagination, but scrubbed and bright and healthy feeling. A clean, well-lighted place.

  “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”

  I remember studying that short story years ago, back in college. Hemingway. His stripped-down prose made everything in life seem somehow stark and drear, like razor-sharp photographic images in black-and-white. This particular story’s about an old drunk man, if I’m remembering correctly, who tried to commit suicide and failed, and now has nowhere else to go for solace but this small cafe, this “clean, well-lighted place.”

  Sheesh. There’s a metaphor for you. A narrow and tragic universe, marked by suffering so profound that it goes unnoticed—or at least unremarked upon.

  Perhaps I should toss that out and see what the old white-haired fool thinks of it.

  Meanwhile, I’m grateful for some space away from Belladonna and from Mama. Here in this booth, I have the best of both worlds. I can be with people without actually having to interact with them. The semblance of relationship without any of the demands.

  That doesn’t sound very emotionally healthy, as I’m sure the old shrink would be quick to point out, but I’m supposed to be honest here and not simply try to make myself look good (for whom?). And the truth is, after the fiasco with Charles Chase, I’m none too eager for any kind of relationship at the moment.

  Was it a fiasco? I keep asking myself that question. Did it have a purpose—other than the obvious, which was to let me bask for a while in the ephemeral delusion that I’m still attractive and desirable?

  He hasn’t called me. I tried to call him a few times, but he wasn’t answering his cell. I didn’t leave a message.

  I can’t figure out if I really miss him or if I only miss the concept of him. The idea of someone who might rouse from the lethargy of a self-absorbed universe to care whether I was alive. Whether I was happy or not.

  Once or twice I drove out past the river camp but saw no signs of life. I have to conclude that he went back to his wife, and in my better moments I wish him well and hope he’s been able to patch things up. On my less noble days I’d just like to feel the comfort of some human contact. Skin. His, or anyone else’s, for that matter—

  “Want a refill, Peach?”

  I slammed the journal shut and jerked to attention. My heart pounded like a thunder drum. It was that woman, the one with salt-and-pepper hair and a perpetually ragged look around her eyes. She was the owner of the place, I was pretty sure. At least she was always here, she and the big black man whose name seemed to be Scratch.

  And she had called me by name.

  “Excuse me?” I muttered.

  She held up the pot. “I asked if you’d like more coffee.”

  “Oh, yes. Thanks.” I pushed my mug over toward the edge of the table. “Do we know each other?”

  “It’s Chulahatchie, hon. Everybody knows everybody.” She grinned. “To be more precise, everybody knows you. You’re the closest thing we’ve got to a celebrity, and—”

  She saw something on my face, something I wasn’t hiding very well, and stopped short. “Sorry. I’m Dell Haley. I own this place.” She grinned. “Well, technically I lease it and the Chulahatchie Savings and Loan owns it. But it’s still mine, long as I pay the bills.”

  “Nice to meet you, Dell.” I held out a hand. She set down the coffeepot, swiped her palm across her apron, and shook it.

  “I was married by the time you started high school,” she said, “but I reckon you remember Boone Atkins.” She pointed.

  He slid out of his booth and came in my direction, and all I could think was, Wow.

  “Hey, Peach,” he said. “Welcome home.”

  He leaned against the booth on Dell’s side and stood there with a relaxed, easy grace. My gut lurched with a little electric shock when he put his hand on her shoulder, as if the gesture was so familiar as to be unconscious.

  Could the two of them be—?

  Nah, not possible. She had to be ten years older than him.

  “You’ve got a Dorian Gray portrait hidden in your closet somewhere,” I told him. “You look exactly the same.”

  “So do you, Peach,” he said. “I’m glad to see you.”

  It was a lie, of course, but what a gracious, compassionate lie! Here I sat, forty pounds overweight, in jeans and a tattered Ole Miss sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off—no makeup, looking like something the cat dragged in.

  We chatted, made a little small talk, and he went on his way. But I could not get him out of my mind, standing there, gazing down at me with those gorgeous eyes, bringing back one of the sweetest, bitterest memories of my adolescence.

  Lord help me, how could I forget? Boone Atkins—tenderhearted, gorgeous, the only boy besides Jay-Jay who ever treated me like a real person with a brain and a heart and a soul. Oh, yes, I remembered Boone. Boone was the one who saved me. And he never even knew it.

  Midway through the eighth grade, Jay-Jay Dickens’s daddy got transferred to Oklahoma. Or at least that’s what he told folks. The whole truth (as only Lorene and I knew it) was that Mr. Dickens had lost his job and couldn’t support his family, so they were all moving west to live with his aunt and uncle in Enid.

  Lorene and I watched as they loaded their belongings into Jay-Jay’s daddy’s pickup truck until it looked like the Okies leaving the Dust B
owl, or the Clampetts on their way to Beverly Hills. The only thing missing was Granny’s rocking chair on top of the pile.

  We said our good-byes and left as night was falling.

  The next morning at school the rumor spread like flesh-eating bacteria: Jay-Jay’s daddy had gone and killed himself. He’d put a bullet through his head by wrapping his mouth around the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun and pulling the trigger with his big toe.

  Without a word to anyone, Lorene and I left school and hightailed it over to Jay-Jay’s house. The sheriff’s car was just driving away when we showed up.

  “So it’s true, then,” I said, but looking at Jay-Jay’s face I hadn’t really needed to ask the question.

  He nodded. His eyes seemed blank and unfocused.

  “What are you going to do now?” It was a stupid question, but I had to fill the empty spaces somehow, try to get closer to him, try to draw him back.

  He shrugged. “Go on to Enid, I reckon. Can’t stay here, anyhow.”

  I opened my mouth to argue with him and then realized the truth of what he said. For one thing, their little rental house had a new tenant coming in next week. But even more important, staying in Chulahatchie would mean living forever with the shame and scandal of his father’s suicide.

  Three days later, we stood on the banks of the Tombigbee River and watched as Mr. Dickens’s ashes floated downstream on the surface of the brown water, around the bend and out of sight. Mrs. Dickens looked pale and rawboned and dazed as she climbed behind the wheel of the pickup and waved good-bye. Jay-Jay waved, too, from his spot in the passenger’s seat, his jaw set in a rigid line and his eyes narrowed with determination. But he didn’t cry. He had to be strong, had to take care of his mama. The note his daddy left him told him so—the same note that explained about the life insurance and how they’d be taken care of now and never have to worry about anything.

  Jay-Jay Dickens was fourteen the day he became a man.