Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  The all-night radio said Shuttlesworth had been injured in the demonstration today. Possibly his ribs were broken. Visitors to the hospital had been forbidden.

  Night Pleasure

  “THERE,” DARL SAID. HE STOPPED AND POINTED TOWARD A crowd of tombstones.

  Following the direction of his pale finger, Stella’s gaze darted through a thicket of tall pointing columns, little Washington monuments, to the figure of an angel with flamboyant wings. As they walked along, Stella trailed her fingertips against the stones, some grainy, others smooth and cold. They were as different as the hands of strangers, but she must pay attention to Darl’s angel.

  With one knee down on a slab of marble, her wings stretched wide, as though she had landed only the moment before they arrived, the angel held a metal staff with a solid glass orb for its finial. The rusty rod passed through a neat hole in her marble hand. The figure’s face was lifted upward and her eyes reviewed the night. A universe of energy and motion had come to a halt on the slab.

  Darl said, “He’s flown through a great distance, through a great darkness.”

  “Or straight from the Renaissance,” she answered. “Traversed time instead of space?”

  “Look at the eyes.”

  They were angry, furious. The marble eyebrows were arched accusingly. The hair looked wild, like another set of wings still held open from the force of the long journey through space. The chin was set at a defiant tilt.

  “He blames God,” Darl said. “He says, ‘Why must we be so small?’ ”

  “Who?”

  “Angels and humans—why must we be so small?”

  “Yes,” Stella answered, and she was afraid. When God’s finger flipped over the car and his fist crushed her family, she should have been defiant. She should have been angry instead of weak and afraid. When she came home from the hospital to the aunts’ house next door, she had hidden her face in the lap of her frail and crippled Aunt Pratt. But she had only been five years old.

  “They shouldn’t have all this clutter around him,” Darl said. “He ought to be in a public place so everybody could see him.”

  “Clutter?”

  “These conventional monuments.”

  “These people have died, too.”

  “Not gloriously,” he said, with contempt.

  “How can you possibly tell?”

  When Darl took her hand to lead her away, she felt annoyed with herself, letting him be so much in charge. The angel could have been deemed female as easily as male. She would think what she would think. She glanced back over her shoulder at the figure whose eyes were staring at the distant moon. That wild defiance—Darl had nothing in common with such a figure. Or had she misunderstood him?

  “There’s a pretty spot down this way,” he said. “Not so crowded. It’s more natural.”

  As soon as he said it, the night became peaceful. The unpleasant heat of her body dissipated. The air smelled good. Before her was the long graceful slope of the hill—just the natural earth, studded here and there with low rectangular monuments. These stones had the proportions of open books, wider than they were high, but their tops had a single graceful arch.

  “This is more peaceful,” she said quietly. This was the right place for her to be—where death and its peace were acknowledged. Let us be true to one another, Matthew Arnold had written in “Dover Beach” as he listened to the sobbing of the sea. So might she say to Darl into the silence of this place.

  But there was no place on earth as peaceful as the cemetery at Helicon where her family lay: one headstone bearing the word Silver, with each of their four names incised lower down. When her time came, would she want to be laid down beside them?

  Darl gestured at the gravestones on the slope. “Which one would you choose to have?” he asked, and suddenly the night went spooky. He became opaque as stone.

  “None,” she said angrily. “I choose to stay above ground for quite a while longer.”

  They walked on silently. She felt outraged by his comment. She thought but did not say, You’re not much acquainted with death. You’d fight it, if you were.

  “ ‘No man knoweth, the day or the hour,’ ” she quoted. But had she embraced life?

  “I believe that’s in reference to the Second Coming,” he said quietly.

  She knew he was right. The statement was about Jesus, but it might as well be about human life and when it would end. She didn’t know what to say to him anymore. She felt as though her face had been rubbed in death.

  Finally he said, “You can hear the city. Even in here.”

  And her attention focused on the sound of a car horn, then a sputtering motor baffled by acres of leafy trees and the prickly wall of evergreen holly leaves. Something gigantic settled in the night—a sound from the steel mills, muffled by the distance and the slopes of the cemetery but surely of deafening volume to anyone close by. She imagined men near the furnace; stripped to the waist, their bodies glistened with sweat in the red glow. They would mostly be black men, she knew. Then Stella noticed Darl and she were holding hands again, but she couldn’t have said when he took her hand. She could love him; yes, she could.

  Far away on the crest of a distant hill of the cemetery, she saw two people walking. They were dark figures silhouetted with clear edges, and they too were holding hands. It was a Negro couple, she could tell by the girl’s hair, sticking up in pigtails. And she wore a much-too-large jacket, which ballooned around her body. His jacket probably. He was in short sleeves. She wouldn’t have seen them except they were silhouetted by the backdrop of sky.

  “Another couple,” Darl said.

  Couple. She loved the word, squeezed his hand, hoped he meant it. She craved the connection implicit in couple.

  Darl stopped at the lip of a drop-off. They stood near the crown of a magnolia tree that had its base far below. The air was perfumed with the redolence of the large blossoms, big as two hands cupped together.

  “It’s gorgeous,” she said.

  “We can go down to it. Here’s a dry creek bed.”

  He stepped down onto some rocks. The descent was steep at first. Then the stepping-stone rocks gave way to a rocky creek bed, a tilted, grooved surface.

  “Does it ever flow?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “But look at the sycamores. They may have their roots in underground moisture.”

  Over their heads, the sycamores from both sides laced their thick arms into an arch. The creek bed bent toward the magnolia and gave way to grass. They crossed a grassy place with no graves, a small meadow lying in the redolence of the beautifully symmetrical, huge magnolia. Covered with large white blossoms, the tree luxuriated in itself. Each blossom glowed, as though the tree were bedecked with lamps. Low-hanging branches hemmed in a profound darkness in the tree’s interior. Stella certainly didn’t want to go in there. She knew the bare-earth dankness under magnolia trees. Because the roots would be partially exposed, one could no more lounge there than on a bone heap.

  Darl led her to the lush grass a short distance beyond the tree.

  “It’s a perfect specimen of a tree,” Stella said.

  “There’s nothing big growing close enough to block its sun,” Darl answered. “It faces south. The north side isn’t so perfect because of the hill. Let’s sit down.”

  Only then did Stella notice that he had brought a large, rolled-up towel along. Yes, she had seen him take it out of the side pocket of the Vespa. He spread the white towel on the grass.

  “Do you want me to break you off a blossom?”

  “I like them on the tree.” She drew the aroma through her nostrils. So soapy. Decadent.

  He flared his hand at the waiting towel, and they sat side by side on the rectangle. Little sticks pressed against her through the terry cloth and through the fabric of her checked dress, through her nylon slip, her cotton panties.

  Darl moved close to her and positioned his arm diagonally for her to lean her back against. He quickly ki
ssed her on the cheek again.

  “Are you comfortable?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Christine at Home

  CHRISTINE CONTEMPLATED THE YELLOW BOWL OF COLD biscuits sitting on the table. Her three children regarded her mischievously. The oldest spoke: “Aunt Dee say she can’t turn on the stove. The gas been shut off.”

  Christine looked at her sister, but she couldn’t feel mad at Dee. Dee had stayed with her kids so she could go out. “Naw,” Christine said fondly, “Dee just too lazy to get up. She got her beer to nurse.”

  “Her beer bottle like a baby bottle,” Diane, her smart daughter, her oldest child, spoke up impertinently.

  “Huh!” Christine and Dee chuffed the word together. No need to scold anybody.

  Christine took a book of matches out of her purse. A waiter at Joy Young Chinese Restaurant had given her the matchbook. Christine had been impressed with him till he said, “How could I guess you had three—skinny woman like you?” She struck a match on the cover, opened the oven door, and held the flame to the pilot light. A swoosh of purple and red ran around the inert burner. “Get some foil out of the used, please, Diane.”

  Her little daughter slid from her place, opened the drawer in the cook table, and got out a foil sheet, crinkly with prior usage.

  “Now put the biscuits on that, and I sprinkle in a little water before you close it up.”

  “I want to sprinkle,” Diane answered.

  “You might do too much. Make ’em soggy.”

  Christine glanced at her sister to try to invite her to talk, but Dee sipped her beer. Why didn’t Dee manage to say something? Not even “Good evening.” You didn’t have to get off your fanny to speak.

  Christine crossed to the sink, turned on the faucet, and wetted just the tips of her fingers; then she slung the water droplets into the foil nest of biscuits. “Close up the foil,” she told Diane, “and you can put ’em in the oven.” Her daughter moved purposefully, with confidence, to obey her mother.

  Christine pulled a ladder-back chair out from the table and sat down across from her sister. “How you feeling, Dee?”

  “I all right.”

  To make her sister speak again, Christine offered no reply.

  Eventually Dee asked, “How you tonight, Eee?”

  Something in her tone undermined the polite question, but she’d said Eee. Dee and Eee—that was their old language for each other. Eee for the last part of Christine.

  “I drew a picture,” Honey said. Her youngest, only three. His name was Henry, but he was the color of honey, and she called him that.

  He showed her a tan paper sack marked with a patch of random black lines leading in all directions.

  “That’s good,” Christine said. She put her arm around her little boy. “What you draw, Honey?”

  “Blowed-up house.”

  Christine stared at the black lines. Planks. Lumber exploding.

  “We heard it,” Dee said. “Over on Dynamite Hill, I reckon.”

  Like a small adult, little Diane turned from the oven. “I told her, it was just the steel mill.”

  Christine reached out for her daughter. “That’s right,” she said. “Not every boom an explosion happening. Might of been a car, backfiring.”

  “Huh!” Dee said. She looked at Christine through half-closed eyes. Dee reached up and unclamped her barrette. Smoothed her hair straight up like a rooster tuft and clamped it again. “Reckon I’ll go on, now you got home, Eee.” Christine’s own hair was straightened and oiled. Parted on one side, it fell in a beautiful stiff swoop, a pageboy just short of her chin. She tended it carefully.

  “You don’t have to go so soon,” Christine said. “Stay and have a hot biscuit.” Suddenly she didn’t want to be alone with her children.

  “Ain’t hungry.”

  Engaged

  THEIR FEET RESTING ON THE GRASS BEYOND THE EDGE OF their towel, Stella and Darl sat close together, kissing each other on the cheek, the neck, the lips, turning their bodies more and more inward with each address. She had forgotten the discomfort of sitting on sticks in the grass.

  “Let’s get up a minute,” Darl said and started to stand. Stella got up but she was sorry that he had disrupted what she was enjoying so much. His voice was tight.

  They stood, and he shook out the towel, repositioned it so that it lay lengthwise with the slope of the hill. “Now,” he said, “let’s lie down.” When they were lying on their sides, their faces ten inches apart, he asked, “Do you like it here?”

  “It’s wonderful,” she said and felt shaky, like froth, like a pink soda was inside her.

  She reached out her hand toward his shoulder, and instantly their bodies clamped together. His hands were all over her back, holding her close, but he only kissed her, over and over, his clothed body straining against hers till they were panting as they kissed.

  Suddenly he rolled away from her, onto his back, gazed up at the moon.

  “Why is this kind of moon called gibbous,” he asked in a low, intimate voice almost a whisper. Such intense trust in his voice, asking something he actually wanted to know, trusting her to be able to tell him. But who was he, and what did she know about him? How different were people who grew up in Norwood from those in the West End?

  She replied softly, “Because its back is hunched, curved like a gibbon, an ape.” She listened to her lips come together and part as she spoke. Sweet little sounds in the still, magnolia air. Like the extra sounds her fingers made on the fingerboard when she played the cello. She had ridden the cello through high school. In college, she’d wanted a new adventure.

  She propped up on one elbow, looked down at Darl’s beautiful moonlit face. His freckles were so close together, just a freckle-breadth of white skin between each dot. Then she saw a movement beyond him, on the other side of the dark magnolia. The sound of moving feet was so slight that she wouldn’t have noticed had she not seen the movement.

  Feet as quiet as fingers scurrying up the fingerboard, but human feet had moved. The sound of a slight scuffling. Someone crouched now under the skirt of dropping magnolia branches.

  She reconstructed the sounds, retrospectively. Feet had brushed quickly over the tops of grass blades. A man had ducked under the skirt of the magnolia, had stopped still upon seeing them, was squatting there now. Waiting. Yes, that was what she must have seen—all of it so quick and quiet, barely lit by the moon, it seemed almost not to have happened. Now the dark man must be quieting his breathing, after running.

  Stella leaned over Darl’s face, as though to kiss him, but her lips went to his ear.

  “There’s somebody hiding under the magnolia tree behind you.”

  “What?” Darl said, quietly, and began to raise himself on his elbow. How she admired his poise, the forced languor of his movements.

  Then she saw a group of colored men coming up the slope. “Yes,” she said, and stood up. She spoke in a normal voice, “There they are.” And Darl quickly stood up.

  The group of four stopped still, surprised to see them.

  “Good evening,” Darl said formally, a formal dignity, neutrality, in his voice.

  “Y’all taking a walk out here?” one of them asked, just an edge of assertiveness in his voice.

  “Yes,” Darl said. “We like to come here sometime.” His voice was without emotion, flat, conveying information without affect or clue as to who they were. They might have been monuments, shrubs. Something just there. Like the blank towel, abandoned and silly on the grass.

  “That your scooter parked out by the gate?” another asked.

  They were big; young men really, not boys. Though she was fleet, if she ran they could probably catch her. She said nothing. Stood ready to try to outrun them.

  “Did the cops get the bike?” Darl answered, and she knew he was trying to create a mutual enemy.

  “Naw, it still there,” one said.

  The young men were constantly moving, restless. She and Darl stood very still. On
e of them nervously took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket.

  Another said, “Hey, you got a quarter or something?”

  Without speaking, Darl slowly reached in his trousers and then held out a coin at arm’s length. He made no comment.

  Better not to comment, Stella thought.

  Then Darl took a pack of Camels from his pocket. Slowly he withdrew a cigarette for himself. “Got a light?” he asked evenly, his eyes fixed on the man who took the coin.

  One of them, not that one, tossed him a lighter, which Darl snapped from the air with a quick downward pounce. He thumbed the wheel, looked down, and slowly leaned into the light. The little flame showed his brow pulled together, concentrating, dragging on the cigarette.

  “Mind we have a smoke?” one asked.

  He held out the lighter and his pack to them.

  When they were all smoking, all but Stella, one of them asked, “Y’all see anybody come through here?”

  Stella could still see the lone man crouching within the darkness of the tree.

  “No,” Darl answered.

  “You ain’t seen nobody run by?”

  Darl just shook his head. He was handling everything just right. Calm, dignified. No bluster.

  “We looking for somebody. Somebody who don’t know how to share.”

  Darl said nothing for a moment. He drew on the cigarette again, kept it in his lips. Then he said, “I think we’ll go on now,” the cigarette tip wagging while he spoke. He reached down to pick up the towel. As he bent, his eyes no longer held theirs.

  He was saving them. He was managing it. For the rest of her life, Stella knew she would be grateful to him. Would remember and respect his savvy, his courage.

  “She your fiancée?”

  Stella was surprised to hear the black man use the French word so effortlessly.

  “Yes,” Darl said. Now his gaze into the other man’s eyes was unflinching.

  Stella knew he meant “I’ll fight.”

  Darl reached out his hand for her, touched her bare arm. “Let’s go on,” he said quietly and initiated their steps away from the group.