Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  He couldn’t stand that—not a hurt child. His mind flew to Korea, the child like a crisp of toast down in the ditch. Not that—and his mind leapt back to now, to his wife, how he had embraced her the very split second after the blast, how he had taken her soft body, safe, yes, safe, pliant and soft, her large breasts, her soft abdomen, there were her swelling buttocks—Agnes, her body melded with him in that moment; closer to him then than in the most perfect synchrony of dancing or the merging of coupling.

  Though the church burst, they found themselves yet alive! Only that. Standing, before the pew where they had been sitting. Together and alive, in the sanctuary, full of shrieks and smoke. Survivors! As after gunfire in Korea, he sensed the safety of the place where he stood. His soft wife, all loving in his arms. His wife, his precious dream of what life was.

  And then, in the surety of her safety, TJ had felt his duty to release her. He must help. There would be no collapse of earth under her feet, and now it was for him, as a soldier, to give aid. Yes, he would scavenge for life in the broken wreckage. People had died; he could not doubt that. And people would have survived; from the perimeter he traveled through zones of disaster toward the wounded and the dead.

  He saw the injured moving in a dust cloud, their faces frozen in the distort of howl. Inside his trouser pocket, his finger closed on his clean handkerchief, folded into quarters, ready to be a compress against the gashed forearm. He took the young person’s hand and showed how to hold the press against the bleeding.

  Through a gap in the roiling smoke he saw the out-of-doors. A wall had been blown away. This sliding debris under his moving feet was leading him downward.

  Here was a deacon, his dark suit powdered white, thumping the back of a little girl doubled up in hysterical coughing. “Take her outside into the air,” TJ said.

  (So, he realized, he must already have left Agnes, turned from her, already preoccupied with his next mission. How could he have left her? Only instinctively; it could not have been a decision. He would have released her and turned not decisively but instinctively, using his preinstructed body without further thought, as surely as he made a turn in dancing, or lifted a suitcase, his body having precalculated its probable weight, in the hotel lobby.)

  TJ’s fingers were removing the paisley tie of the man standing beside him. At TJ’s feet lay a man with his head resting on three bricks still mortared together; his pant leg was torn away and the femoral blood surging out. TJ applied the paisley tie as a tourniquet. Beyond the torn leg, to the left of his focusing, there was a worse horror.

  TJ’s gorge rose; skin had been charred, a small charred body. A child’s shoe. A shoe.

  Now TJ screamed. Now his voice joined the chorus of grief, horror, grief, outrage.

  Was this what they had caused when they had answered the call in August, marched on Washington? He had been a part of the multitude gathered around the reflecting pools, the rectangles reflecting the sky, King’s voice reflecting their hearts: “I have a dream, I have a dream, I have a dream when my four little children…not for the color of their skin but for the content of their character….”

  I live a nightmare, I live a nightmare. Now he was bending, lifting with his back, not his legs, forgetting his training, bending, his hands becoming paws, digging like a dog.

  But he had held Agnes. His softly yielding Agnes. Raised Catholic (“Hail Mary, full of grace,” that was what she said), and she had come to this Baptist place with him, after he went to Washington. Agnes had come to please him, because this church was a center for the struggle, because last May he had watched the children stream down the steps from this church speaking of nonviolence. Because he had to get into the heart of that idea before he killed somebody again. Killed somebody in his own country.

  He knew what he could not face: the eyes of the parents of dead children. But he could dig. Dig with his bare hands. Dig for buried bone and blood-wet flesh.

  The Face of Christ

  WHEN CHRISTINE LOOKED AROUND THE FINE CHURCH, SHE had felt out of place and awed by the beautiful pews and carpets, the radiant stained-glass pictures. At Gloria’s suggestion, they’d come early to get settled. They would watch the people congregate. In comparison, Christine’s Bethel Church seemed small and drab, but Christine told herself that the Holy Spirit didn’t care where he dwelt. Then she thought of Reverend Shuttlesworth and how the spirit came into him at Bethel and through him to her. That was what counted.

  Gloria showed her the bulletin and whispered quietly about the worship service.

  “It has eight parts,” Gloria explained, “including the musical prelude and postlude.” She put her finger on some boldface printing. “This is for the responsive reading.” Gloria had chosen a good spot for them, not too close to the pulpit, not so far back you couldn’t feel like a part. “He usually says something to make everybody smile about here,” Gloria said, pointing her finger to the page. “And—”

  Christine and Gloria reeled from the blast. They sprang to their feet, bodies shaking and trembling. The congregation erupted in screams. “Thank the Lord, thank the Lord!” Christine screamed not because she was alive but because her babies were safe. Little Honey, Diane, and Eddie; her children were at their own humble Sunday school, not this rich place. Terrified, she and Gloria grabbed each other and sobbed and shrieked. Others rushed from the pews.

  Bombed! Bombed in church! For nothing. For worshiping God. Christine howled for revenge. All the oppression of her life—her rage blew out the circuits of her mind. She seemed molten with hatred, but she clung to her friend and wept. Christine felt useless, immobile, devastated with hysteria. Not safe in church.

  She sobbed with shame, boiled with hatred. No safe place. She wept with shame. They allowed no sanctity, no sacred place. And she? The force of hate left her mindless. Helpless. Bound to the shame of her own helplessness. Raped again, made helpless. She lost her mind with it. All she could do was cling to Gloria, hurting Gloria with the desperation of her clenching fingers. Christine could only clutch harder and harder until she felt the force of Gloria’s own fingers squeezing back. But Gloria was not clinching out of terror.

  As desperately as you need me, Gloria’s hands meant, so will I return your grasp. Gloria’s replying grasp was full of calm.

  I AM NOT AFRAID, Gloria thought. Here am I.

  Billows of dust came toward them, passed through them, passed on, and then Gloria saw, as she held Christine, that they yet stood in the place she had selected just before the explosion. Behind her, presiding high over the violated church, stood the full, stained-glass figure of Christ, faceless. Instead of Christ’s face, a blank opened to the sky.

  Christ’s face, only his face, blown out. Gloria pressed Christine to her bosom, held her as tightly as she could. If they bombed again, she would save Christine, protect her with her own body.

  No convulsion followed, except convulsions of screaming and fear.

  Through the empty face of Christ, Gloria saw her world—a bit of treetop against blue.

  What did it mean that God had let the face of his only begotten Son be destroyed? Where was the hand of God when it failed to protect his home and his worshipers from hate? Sunlight continued to pass, indifferently, through the stained glass still standing in the windows. Stained purple, the light caught the motes of dust that clogged the air, and purpled them.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Christine said, and her vomit splashed onto the polished wooden back of the pew. She sat down weakly. “I hate them so much, it’s killing me.” Christine put her arm on the back of the pew, leaned her face into the crook of her arm and sobbed.

  Gloria let her be. Floured with plaster dust, Christine seemed shrouded. Over her navy blue suit, her skin, her hair, had been thrown a veil of powder. As Christine sobbed, dust rose from her shoulders. The wailing of the broader misery, police sirens, someone shouting orders washed over them, and every moment they breathed the dust and the odor of something broken open that should have
been kept sealed.

  Someone Small

  AFTER SHE FOUND HER WAY OUT OF THE CHURCH, AGNES stood on the street with hundreds of others. These were her neighbors, some of them. Many of them were strangers, but familiar in their Sunday-best dresses and heels, their suits and ties. Here were ambulances, police. A few white faces looking at what white had done.

  Agnes saw her husband working in the debris. TJ was pointing out a spot to the white men. TJ was telling them what to do, working with them. He had forgotten his own black skin, their paleness.

  When the woman next to her began to sob, Agnes reached out and drew the strange woman to her bosom.

  A stretcher was carried into the rubble.

  Agnes saw charred flesh. Unmoving flesh. Someone small. Poor naked body. Someone young.

  Then Agnes saw a head. All alone. A child’s head blasted from her body. And Agnes fainted.

  She felt her knees hit the pavement, and she was gone.

  Homeward

  “TAKE THE CHILDREN HOME,” LIONEL PARRISH TOLD Jenny. “They’re needing help over there. No need for the children to see.”

  “Y’all come with me,” Jenny said. She took the hands of her daughters. “Andy, you and George hold their other hands.”

  As though they’d forgotten something at home, Jenny turned the children around on the sidewalk. The boys had to step on the grass because the walk wasn’t wide enough to hold them all. Jenny glanced at the trees, saw their leaves were still coated with tired dust. Whatever had happened back there at Sixteenth Street Baptist, this world was the same here, a block or two away. Everybody else was running toward the church. They shrieked and the ambulance sirens and police cars screamed down the street.

  “I want to help,” George said.

  “Your daddy say we all to go home. Can’t no child help with this.”

  “I’m going to,” George said, and he dropped Vicky’s hand and ran.

  “George!” Jenny shrieked, and her voice was like a bullet that stopped him dead in his tracks.

  George turned and came back, but his cheeks were streaked with tears.

  Jenny reached out her hand, and with the thumb of her white glove, she smeared away his tears.

  “These just the first,” Jenny said. “Gonna be many a tear before this day forgot. Come on now, baby, like your daddy said.”

  They walked on, Jenny thinking I don’t like turning my back on this.

  When they passed their parked car, George said, “Mama, ain’t you gonna drive us?”

  “You know I not ever learned to drive.”

  “Why not?” Vicky asked.

  “We leave the car here for your daddy,” Jenny said. “It be waiting when he ready to come home.”

  It would be a long walk in Sunday pumps. Buses hardly ran on Sunday. Already her right foot was kicking the left foot.

  Old Aunt Charlotte

  IN HELICON, ALABAMA, OLD AUNT CHARLOTTE TOLD HER aged children Christopher Columbus Jones and Queen Victoria Jones, “He’p me up to the Methodist church. I want to sit there.”

  “Let me get you a fresh head rag,” Victoria said.

  Chris pulled a quilt off his mother’s bed to line the wheelbarrow.

  The barrow lay upside down to keep out the rain, right beside the worn steps. With difficulty, Chris righted it, but he had to take his time.

  “Let me walk,” his mother was saying as she hesitated at the top of the three stairs. Her neck was bent down, but her body stood straight. She wore a clean, faded apron, and the clean head rag was a matching strip of fabric printed with now-faded red circles.

  She over a hundred years old. She don’t look it, Chris thought. Dressed up, matching clothes. I look older than my own mama.

  “Church folks done be gone,” Victoria said, “time we get there ’less you let Chris push you.”

  They already gone, Charlotte mumbled too low for even Victoria (standing right beside her on the threshold with her hand under Charlotte’s elbow) to hear. Charlotte had felt their passing. Good children. Good girls. We come to say good-bye, one of the spirits had whispered. With utmost respect, because you the oldest living.

  ’Cause you seen so much, another girl-voice said. Words like distant cowbells.

  We be waiting for you, when you come. The third girl had a low, patient voice, like creek-flow.

  Grannie, would you tie my sash a little better?

  They’d wakened her from her doze with their wispy young voices. Four spirits passing. They troubled the air over where she lay snoozing in bed. No more than breath, they wafted past, talking among themselves. Detouring. Little city girls, leaving Birmingham. They sang a hymn, so high up in the air, each with her own note but all together. They sang so high as they disappeared, grew small as four specks, into infinity.

  They sang like they were already angels. Voices like chimes.

  Doctor and Mrs. Doctor and their children, been several years now, not too long ago, had given her wind chimes when they visited. Sweet as church bells, Doctor had said. Maybe it was the chimes had woke her, four metal tubes stirring in the Sunday breeze.

  Well, Charlotte would know when she saw the white folks leaving their church.

  “You come ride in the barrow, Mama,” Chris said. “I have you there in no time.”

  “I scared you spill me, Chris.”

  “Never have,” he answered, looking sullen.

  “No, I’ll just walk. Not but a mile. They church not even started yet. Y’all come get on each side.”

  Chris felt his neck creak, his head bend a little lower—oh, just a tiny fraction of an inch closer to despair. When his chin touched his chest, he’d likely die. But not till then. Till then, his mama was the boss.

  Slowly Charlotte crept down the steps. Victoria plucked the quilt from the barrow in case her mother needed to lie down beside the path and rest.

  Tentatively, Charlotte sent one foot sliding forward through the raked red dust. Her shoe sole grated over the little stones under the dust. Then the other foot followed, sliding and scuffling.

  “See,” Charlotte said proudly. “That’s how walking’s done. One foot at a time.”

  “We’ll get there,” Victoria said. Her voice strong as the steel spring in a mousetrap.

  “Reckon I’ll stay home,” Chris muttered.

  His mother looked back at him and slowly smiled. “No, you come on, too, honey. Mama needs you to help her.”

  So the three of them slowly progressed to the edge of the yard. Then Charlotte stopped. She looked back.

  “ ‘Little house, little house,’ ” she said. “ ‘Stay still as a mouse. Don’t make a sound, and don’t fall down,’ ” but she was living in another time. She was a young woman, and Doctor, just a boy ten years old, had stopped on this very spot, at the edge of the yard. It was white family’s dwelling then, and Doctor had a long burlap cotton sack slung over his shoulder. He held the belly of the long bag bunched up so it wouldn’t drag through the woods, get caught on little sticks and briars. Straight, smart little boy, with blue-gray eyes. He was off to the fields to pick a hundred pounds of cotton. Little sister—Miss Krit—was just born, that morning, in the house, and they told Doctor-that-was-to-be if’n he picked a hundred pounds, he could hold the baby. Standing on this spot, he had looked back at the house, and made up a charm:Little house, little house, stay still as a mouse. Don’t make a sound, and don’t fall down.

  It had taken Charlotte a moment to rummage around in memory to find the words, but the charm had lasted all these years. The house still stood.

  “Now we can speed up a little,” she told her children, stepping beyond the yard onto the path through the woods. “I remember how this walking’s done.”

  A small frail baby, Krit had been an easy birth for a woman who’d had five before. As soon as she came out, Charlotte had read her puckered face: this one would make trouble for somebody, later on in life. But so far, she hadn’t. She’d never married, taken care of her mother in her old age,
was taking care of Miss Pratt, stove up with the rheumatism. And Doctor’s little orphan girl.

  Today was a good day at Helicon in September, still warm enough for the pine trees to give out their piney smell. Their fallen needles, long and brown, were soft underfoot, but they could be slippery, and it was best to hold to somebody.

  I wish you Birmingham gals could all just stay here with me, Charlotte thought. Where had those specks gone? Enjoy this Alabama sunshine. These good smells. This soft path. She breathed it all in, could feel her nostrils spread. Reckon y’all’s feet don’t need no earthly path. She had her faith, but it was a sad thought. Y’all mighty sweet. Coming by my bed like that, tell old Grannie good-bye.

  Then Charlotte took such a mighty breath—life, life—it resounded like a snore, and Victoria said, “You all right, Mama?”

  “Sure am,” Charlotte answered and quickened her steps. They’ve flown on. Hardly stayed a second, just long enough for Charlotte to get her eyes open, see the place where they’d hovered in the empty air.

  She glanced to her left, saw the pond below the spring all covered with green. She wished Victoria and Chris wouldn’t let the water scum up that way. She swung her gaze to the right. Yes, there was her big rock. Even in the winter, when she sat down there, her boulder had stored-up sunshine to offer. She’d rather be buried under that rock than anywhere else on earth. Lie close to home. But that was a wish she’d never tell; she knew it was her duty to go into the church graveyard—colored side—when her time come.

  Oh, she remembered now: she’d decided against dying. She was staying here. Y’all come back to visit. She sent the message out to all who had gone before. Anytime.