Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Shocked at Darl’s exclamation, Stella had just stood there staring down at him. Had she ever heard anyone say the word rape out loud? Then she thought of Professor Andrew Gainey, at the college, singing the rape song from The Fantasticks at the top of his lungs. It hadn’t meant rape at all; it had meant sex. With his resonant, confident, gleeful voice, he was letting sex out of the bank vault and into the world. Beautiful.

  Stella moved her hand from her crotch and touched her engagement ring. Such a sweet circle, topped with its little diamond. A diamond like a clear seed. Aunt Krit didn’t accept Darl as her fiancé. “I don’t believe you love him,” Krit had said. “When you set the wedding date, then I’ll believe it.”

  Stella had asked, “Why don’t you believe I’ll marry Darl? I have a ring.”

  “I just know,” her aunt said. “He’s not right for you. I believe we might be distant kin to his family.” But she never offered a shred of evidence.

  From her bed, Aunt Pratt called, “No, we’re not.”

  “He’s no Prince Philip,” Aunt Krit replied from the kitchen. That was it; she didn’t think anybody but a prince might be good enough for her niece. “He’s not Prince Rainier.”

  The aunts never disagreed face-to-face, but in their trans-room differences, Stella always rooted for Aunt Pratt.

  Stella held up the ring to let the moonlight kiss it.

  So, she’d been masturbating so hard, she’d jiggled the bed. She’d awakened herself. She laughed out loud, but quietly. What kind of repressed southern lady coward are you? Consciously, she placed the palm of her hand over her nightgown and rubbed. Nothing happened. That was fine. She smiled at herself again and made a vow to do just as she pleased with her body. But not to tell. Well, she could probably tell Nancy; they always confided in each other.

  She hadn’t told Darl but tomorrow after school and before work at Fielding’s, she was going to the gynecologist. At the doctor’s, she would get a prescription for birth control pills, and then she and Darl could do what they wanted. She wasn’t as stupid as she looked standing against the oak tree on the boulevard: he had needs, and so, it turned out, did she. Sexual needs.

  But Old Maid Aunt Krit was right that they hadn’t set any wedding date yet.

  Stella held her hand up in the moonlight and spread her fingers, as though she would seine the light. She looked at the opposite wall to see if the moonlight was strong enough to cast a shadow. It wasn’t. The light was diffuse. The whole room was luminous; the dresser and the closet door, her hand, all were equally magical.

  Quietly, she slid down from the high bed and sat on the bench before the three-way mirror. She wanted to see her face in moonlight. There she was. It was as though she were walking through the woods, came to a still pond, and looked down to see her own face. Here she was in a quiet room, a virgin fair in an enchanted world.

  Tomorrow, November 22, would be an important day: she would get birth control pills, and a new world would open to her. But the store was open of course Friday night—a pre-Thanksgiving sale—and she’d have to go to work the switchboard, the same as every Friday night.

  How the News Came to the Joneses

  “FIX MY COFFEE,” RYDER JONES SAID TO HIS WIFE.

  “All right, hon,” Lee answered.

  While she opened the door on the pantry cabinet, she glanced at her husband, who was working at the kitchen table. Ryder was as absorbed with his wires and clocks as son Bobby making a model airplane. Friday was Ryder’s half-day off this month, and he was wasting the afternoon as usual. Up on the cabinet shelf beside the Maxwell Instant, she noticed the cylindrical cardboard box of Morton’s salt.

  Stealthily, Lee dumped the sugar out of the sugar bowl and into a cracked cup and hid the cup on a high shelf. She took the salt down, lifted up the metal spout in the lid. As the metal shunt came up, the cardboard creaked a little, but Ryder didn’t glance her way.

  Lee’d always admired how neatly made a salt box was—a sturdy cylinder completely closed, except for that one little snout of a spout, the box wrapped round with a nice navy blue label. Like it was dressed up to go out. The box never got out of working order either. She poured the salt into the sugar bowl.

  Ryder was still absorbed in reading his bomb directions. She turned and flicked on the gas under the one-quart white enamel pot. She used that pot just to boil water, and it had tan mineral deposits on the inside. Lee had asked Ryder couldn’t she have a little kettle for the stove, but he’d said there wasn’t any need. Around the top of the white enamel pot ran a line of red trim, bright and nice, except where she’d banged it once and there was a black chipped place.

  Ryder was reading the directions one of his Klan buddies had printed down for him. Handwriting like a second grader, Lee thought. It had occurred to her that since she had children of different ages, she could figure out at exactly what age each of his Klan buddies had stopped growing up. Ryder himself was about ten, same as Bobby, but Bobby was still growing. Some of the Klan were more like six or seven.

  Suddenly she said to Ryder, “You know sometimes I wonder if the kids might be better off brought up Catholic.”

  “Catholic!” he yelled and banged the table with his fist. His soldering iron leapt onto the floor. “Now look what you made me do!”

  She’d wanted to rile him, and she had. She was bored. He ought to pay more attention to her. Take her out to a movie. At least talk to her, not sit there playing like a child. “Well I was just thinking about it,” she said, completely unruffled.

  He responded to her ease with his own good humor. “Kennedy works for the pope.”

  She said nothing. Kennedy was the only politician who wasn’t a complete bore, and that was just because he was good-looking. Ryder picked up his iron and inspected the tip for damage.

  “That’s one thought you’d better put out of your head, girl,” Ryder said. “Catholics aren’t real Americans.”

  She nodded at the mess of buckets and bobbers on the table. “I don’t think they’ll want any more bombs now for a long, long time,” she said.

  “You don’t know nothing about it.” The tide of scorn began to rise in his tone.

  “How come you don’t already know how to make it, if you done what you said you done?”

  “There’s different types.”

  “How’d you do the other?”

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “I can smell Bobby’s airplane glue all the way in here from the living room,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He fell silent.

  Lee wandered into the front room. The two little ones were playing Go Fish on the floor, proud that they knew their numbers well enough to compete. But it was Bobby she was proud of. He was 100 percent pure boy with a shock of hair on his forehead; she loved the way he was focused on making his model. Bobby was gluing the little gas tank onto the end of a fighter wing. He didn’t even know she’d come into the room. She’d let him stay home with a cold.

  Ryder ought to be proud of his kids, she thought. She imagined her children crossing themselves like Catholics did in the movies and thought how sweet and pious Bobby, Shirley, and Tommy would look. She’d known some Italian Catholics growing up. They were the same as anybody. Maybe happier, with their big families and huge dishes of spaghetti.

  “Water’s boiling,” Ryder called.

  “You know what, Ryder?” she said, reentering the kitchen. “I think it’s nothing but ignorance to be down on Catholics.”

  “I don’t want to ever hear you say that again.” He sounded tense.

  “Well what’d they do?” She selected a cracked cup for Ryder on purpose. “They didn’t crucify Jesus.”

  “Hurry up, will you? You’re slow as Christmas.”

  “Well, what’d they do?” She set the coffee and the sugar bowl and a spoon down in front of Ryder. “You fix the sugar to suit.”

  She watched him spoon the crystals into his cup, two teaspoonfuls. He stirred it to help it cool.

&nbs
p; “Back in the 1920s, we had to shoot that Father Coyle.”

  She laughed. “You wasn’t even alive back in the 1920s. How could you shoot anybody?”

  “The Klan. It was a Methodist minister Klan member kilt him.”

  “I just don’t believe that.”

  “That Father Coyle married the Methodist minister’s daughter to a Mexican, and he was Catholic. He shot him on the porch of the priest house.”

  “I never read any Alabama history about that.”

  “It’s not all in books, Lee. But people know, and we hand it down, from generation to generation.” He sipped his coffee and yelled, “God-damn son of a bitch! What’d you put in my coffee?”

  She smiled prettily, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Same old coffee.”

  He licked his finger and stuck it in the sugar bowl, then in his mouth. “This here is salt!”

  She licked her finger and tasted, mimicking him. “Why, I believe you’re right.” She was in a fine mood.

  Springing out of his chair, Ryder dashed the contents of the coffee cup into the sink. He banged the cup on the drain board, and it broke in two, right along a crack line.

  “Don’t break up the dishes, hon,” she said.

  “Don’t you stand there like an idiot with your finger stuck in your mouth. I asked you for some coffee.”

  “Well, I’ll just have to start over.” She turned her back to him, but she heard him fling open the cabinet doors.

  “Where’s the gol-durned sugar!” He was scanning the high shelves.

  “I’ll look, honey. You just sit down and figure on your bomb.”

  “Here it is!” he announced. “Somebody poured it out of the bowl and into this cup. You do that, Lee?”

  “Now why’d I’d gone and did a silly thing like that, Mr. Ryder Jones?”

  He sprang at her and slapped her finger out of her mouth.

  “Mr. Tough Guy,” she taunted.

  He grabbed her hand and twisted her arm behind her back. “You better tell me the truth, woman, or I’m gonna teach you.”

  “Teach me what?” He wasn’t hurting her much. “You’re just making a tempest out of a teapot.”

  When Ryder jerked her hand up, hard, a switch flipped inside her. Something familiar and intense was beginning, though it was only afternoon.

  “That hurts!” she said. “Stop it!” A current of fear like a thrill went through her. But suddenly there was Bobby standing in the doorway.

  “Dad,” he said, “whatcha doing to Mama?” He seemed scared but brave.

  “Oh, Bobby,” she said, “we were just playing.” He looked small, just a little boy.

  He brushed his forelock away from his eyes. “You said it hurts. Just now you said ‘That hurts!’ ” All innocence, he was just asking a question. He had a cold in his nose.

  Ryder said threateningly, “Go back in the living room, son.”

  Ryder was hurting her worse, but she wouldn’t let on in front of Bobby. She just said to her son, “Please, Bobby, go on.”

  After the boy turned to go, the phone rang, and Ryder hurried to answer it. Then Ryder pivoted Lee around in front of him and slapped her hard across the face. “I got to go in to work,” he said.

  Then the doorbell rang, and everything sped up. While her head swiveled, she could see Bobby standing at the front door, talking to Bob Chambliss, then calling back to the kitchen, “Daddy, daddy, come quick. Mr. Chambliss says they shot the president.”

  Ryder ran through the house—“Hot dog!”—out the screen door—“No lie?”—and down the steps with his friend.

  “I’m going, too,” Bobby shouted back at her and ran after the men.

  Unperturbed, Shirley slapped down a two of spades on the bare floor.

  “What’s happened?” her little brother asked.

  “I dunno. Somebody got shot.”

  Stella’s Odyssey

  WHEN ELLIE SIGNALED THROUGH THE LIBRARY QUIET FOR Stella to wait, Stella had already gathered up her books and was about to leave the Birmingham-Southern College library to get a bus to town, then see the gynecologist, then maybe kill some time at Parisian’s, then on to Fielding’s and her Friday evening work on the switchboard. But Ellie said, “Wait.” Stella stopped beside the railing around a large opening down to Circulation. Ellie leaned close to Stella’s ear to whisper the news. Then Ellie drew back, her eyes locked on Stella, the corners of her mouth curiously turning slightly up.

  Ellie was a friend, a talented actress, a liberal. Ellie certainly wasn’t amused. Stella felt hysterical, as though she might lose her balance, pitch over the railing, and land down below, headfirst, onto the circulation desk. She saw her head breaking into two neat pieces. Her heart seemed to be caving in, and the book-lined world was filmed with tears.

  But why this stupid twitching of the lips, as though I might smile? Stella asked herself.

  Ellie added, still slightly smiling, “I can’t believe it.”

  “Maybe it’s a rumor,” Stella whispered back. “Like ‘The War of the Worlds’?”

  “I don’t think so. It was a real reporter. Dan Rather in Dallas, Texas.”

  They were taking turns leaning toward each other’s ears in a strange, weaving choreography.

  “But who’s he?”

  “The local reporter, in Dallas.”

  Now they controlled the curling of their lips; they assumed immobile expressions like stunned, fixed masks.

  “I don’t believe it,” Stella said. “I have to go catch my bus.” She didn’t say Today I take charge of my body, I get birth control pills. “I have to go to work this evening.”

  As she pushed through the door, she heard a loud voice saying from the circulation desk: “May I have your attention. May I have your attention, please. We have terrible news….” But now she was outside.

  Stella ran as fast as she could on the grass around the library, then pell-mell like a child, down the steep hill toward Arkadelphia Road and the bus stop. It can’t be. Not after the bombing. During that funeral, Stella had looked at herself in the mirror in her bedroom and said over and over “Coward!” Trees should burst into flame while she ran down the hill away from the college.

  A new atrocity? Run! I won’t believe it. It probably was true.

  In 1956, she had wanted so badly for Kennedy to get the nomination for vice president. Can’t they see? Can’t they see? She was thirteen. How could they choose that plain Estes Kefauver? And the Democrats had lost (Can my side really lose?), though even her Aunt Krit had admired Adlai Stevenson, and voted for him. Aunt Krit said Stevenson was actually intelligent. Her voice had been choked with emotion, as though she, too, at last, had something in common with the life of the nation.

  Then Krit had said, “You like Kennedy so much, read this.” Aunt Krit’s voice had to fight its way up from her throat. She wanted so ardently to instill her niece with values precious to herself that she scarcely dared represent them with words or deeds. “I bought it in the book department at Loveman’s,” Krit said proudly. “Kennedy wrote it. Profiles in Courage.”

  Stella had made herself read each of the biographical sketches. Aunt Krit doesn’t want me to love somebody just because of his looks, she had thought. Even then, Stella knew that Aunt Krit, in her gruff way, was trying to protect her from a dangerous susceptibility:look-love. But Kennedy was smart enough to write a history book. Aunt Krit revered that. “He wrote it while he had a broken back.”

  And now the man was cut down, in all his prime and glory.

  Divorced from her body, Stella ran lickety-split down the wooded hillside from the college to the street. She leapt over rocks without noticing them.

  When Kennedy had been elected president, Stella had thought smugly of her own ability to recognize his promise: yes, she herself had had some insight into politics and intuition about who was going to count. And his wife was beautiful and loved classical music and spoke French. Ellie, her friend, looked something like Jackie Kennedy.

&nb
sp; Why had Ellie smiled? Was it the smile of embarrassment—that they lived in such an unbelievably cruel world?

  After he had been safely elected president, people had said Kennedy never would have been allowed on the ticket for president if he’d been the vice presidential nominee running with Stevenson, who would have lost in any case. No Stevenson-Kennedy nor any other possible combination could have beaten Ike. That’s what people said, and then Stella’s smugness melted, and she knew how ignorant she was of the ways of the world and of politics. If, in 1956, she had gotten her wish, it would have doomed Kennedy.

  But he was doomed. Shot or dead?

  She’d reached the bus stop. It was a miracle she hadn’t fallen down the hill. But she must have turned her foot. Her ankle was throbbing. Her body, too, was cramping. She felt as though her body was opening to bleed. It was supposed to be tomorrow, not today. The gynecologist didn’t want her to schedule her appointment during her period. Maybe it wasn’t much flow. But she could feel herself starting to bleed. He was bleeding in Texas. He might be dying.

  Her books weighed so heavily that she felt too weak to hold them. They fell around her feet. She felt as though she might faint. This was the president. It was like saying God was dead, and that was what Nietzsche had said.

  Stella gasped for air as she watched cars drive past the bus stop. Did they know? The president was shot. Her stomach roiled. When Stella’s philosophy professor had enunciated Nietzsche’s “God is dead” in his lecture, she had thought she was going to be sick. But the teacher said that for existentialists the death of the idea of God meant a certain kind of freedom. Exhilaration! But for others, that we were doomed to freedom.

  She knelt to pick up her books. The professor had turned around and recreated on the blackboard a cartoon he’d seen. He’d written “God is dead” and attributed the quotation to Nietzsche. Then he’d crossed out the quote and written under it: “Nietzsche is dead” and under that line, he signed “God.”