Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “Just where do you guys think you’re going?” She so mad she could spit.

  “Our new teacher say we can go get some water.”

  “You get back in your seats!” And they go back. Sure wish I could boss like that.

  Miss Silver tells Christine, “They’re right. I did say they could have a drink.”

  “They don’t need no drink. You get back in your seat now.”

  “Ah, Mrs. Taylor, can I go to the bathroom,” Sam whines. Little-boy acting. He ain’t got a prayer.

  “You just hold it. I said sit down!”

  Miss Silver she’s walking up to Christine with her hand held out, says, “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Stella Silver.”

  “Hi,” Christine says, but she doesn’t shake hands, and she’s sure enough going to ignore her. Not much shorter you can say than hi. “You kids bring pencil and paper like I told you to?”

  “I brought a half-sheet.” Said respectfully, subdued. And another: “I got a pencil—if he lend me one.”

  “Shut your lip. Either you got your own pencil, or you not got one. How y’all expect to learn anything you don’t come prepared? You want to spend the rest of your lives on the highway picking up white folks’ litter? Huh? That’s what’s going to happen to you if you don’t get a high school diploma.”

  “We were talking about subject-verb agreement,” Miss Silver tells Christine, but she don’t pay no attention. Doesn’t. I know better. When I’m scared, I think bad grammar.

  “I want you to learn some new words,” Christine says like Miss Silver is just an insect. “But you didn’t even bring any paper to write them down on. Your vocabulary is pitiful. You don’t know the words for nothing.” Christine’s face is all scowled up. “If you don’t know words, how you going to express yourself? Tell me that.”

  “We all gots to work on our vocabulary,” sweet Mrs. LaFayt says. “I know I do.”

  “Now you show Miss Silver what you remember.” (Miss Silver looks interested. She keeps her mouth shut.) “Perseverance,” Christine calls out.

  Guess I better let my group recite some.

  “Turn your fact sheet over. What happened in 1776?”

  Mrs. LaFayt is unclasping her black patent leather handbag. She gets out her word definition paper from last time so she can read. A voice in Gloria’s history group startles her: “Declaration of Independence,” her smart student answers.

  “Perseverance,” Mrs. LaFayt says. She checks her slip of paper again. “You got to stick to what you’re doing. If you’re going to accomplish it.”

  “You got that?” Christine asks them all. “What does perseverance mean?”

  “Hangin’ in there.”

  And Christine is pleased. She laughs a little. She wants to be nice. She’s just got too much on her. She calls out another word.

  “Vindicate!”

  And Mrs. LaFayt is back in her purse, looking.

  “Don’t use your notes,” Christine instructs. “You’re supposed to know this. Your mind isn’t inside your bag, Mrs. LaFayt.”

  But Mrs. LaFayt goes right on looking. “Well, I just need a little reminder. Let’s see. Vindicate is to get revenge.”

  “Well, more like to clear yourself. ‘He was accused of stealing, but when the truth comes out, he will be vindicated.’ ” Christine smiles more; she looks like a cannibal about to eat somebody up.

  Christine goes on. “What you going to say, Charles, when somebody accuses you of a crime?”

  “Not guilty.”

  Now he’s in a good mood again. He’s got his teach back. Charles probably wouldn’t have demonstrated if Christine hadn’t said she was going. Across the room, Arcola laughs (she’s listening in, too) at clever Charles, who’s tall as a basketball player and not really mean. Even Christine is amused.

  “Mr. Parrish said for you to go help Arcola with her group,” Christine says all of a sudden to Miss Silver.

  “Really? I thought this was my group.”

  “This is my group.”

  I go, you go, he, she, or it goes; we go, you go, they go. That’s Arcola’s group.

  “I don’t think they need me,” Miss Silver says, lightly.

  I come, you come, he, she, or it comes; we come, you come, they come.

  “Hey, Sam, do you come?” Charles punches his friend, real hard, on the arm.

  “You shut your foul mouth,” Christine tells him in words like knife blades. “I hear something like that out of you again, and you’re going out. O-U-T.”

  “I wish you would both be our teachers,” Mrs. LaFayt says.

  The break bell sears through the heat.

  Aftermath: Living it Again

  WHEN CAT LAY ON HER BED THAT NIGHT, HER FIRST NIGHT in the classroom, she couldn’t sleep. She was too happy to even want sleep. They’d learned it; she coaxed them to learn the names of the bones in the legs and arms. They’d liked the Latin words. She’d told them about the humerus, the funny bone. She’d watched the glow of pride spread from face to face with the acquisition of a smattering of Latin and the knowledge of the invisible bone structure inside each human being. Lying flat on her back, Cat knew she smelled bad, but she’d been too tired to bathe. Her body soaked up the cool from the bedroom air conditioner like a sponge. So what if her armpits reeked. The classroom was a closed oven. Maybe tomorrow night, if the windows at school could be opened just a crack….

  Aftermath: “Träumerei”

  WHEN STELLA WAS A LITTLE GIRL, THEY HAD GONE TO A swimming pool, and her mother, who couldn’t swim, had walked in the water carrying Stella draped over her arms as though she were a princess or a bride. Stella had never felt such peace. The water was cool and her mother’s body was warm and soft. Her brothers played with an inner tube; her father swam a slow sidestroke in the deep water.

  After she left off Cat and the car, all the way walking home, Stella had felt like that: soft arms were cradling her; the universe loved and protected her. She was safe and happy. She deserved to be coddled. Of course the Negroes were resentful: she understood that. She had done her job.

  At the swimming pool the PA system had played the Schumann “Träumerei,” and later, though she was only five, she’d played it on her little cello, sliding effortlessly into fourth position for the soaring note that made the piece formidable. Her mother had accompanied her on the piano with slow chords.

  As a very young child, she had seemed terrifically talented, a wunderkind. After her mother’s death, she had seemed less talented each succeeding year. She hated to perform; she wanted to do only things that were personal and private. At the end of high school, she ceremoniously locked her cello in its hard case.

  Lying in bed, Stella felt happy to be alone, out of the bright heat of the classroom. In the summer long ago before the accident, the sash beside the bed would be up and the bed nestled beside the window to catch the breeze. The attic fan sucked in the cool of the night. Once her light was out, she spied on Mrs. Kolowski in her kitchen doing the supper dishes after her husband had gone to bed. It was magic, the way the dark of the bedroom concealed Stella. Utterly fascinated, she watched Mrs. Kolowski passing a dishrag over the stained plates. That’s her life, little Stella had thought. I’m getting to see her life. Sometimes Mrs. Kolowski walked across the linoleum, a checkerboard pattern, red and black.

  Stella thought of the Negro teachers she had met. Christine Taylor would be home now. At break time, Arcola had told Stella that Mrs. Taylor had three children, that she’d been married three times. Stella wanted to know their stories.

  At her home, was the forceful Mrs. Taylor angry? Was she happy?

  And what of Don on the other side of the world? He was just waking up as she was drifting off to sleep. We can stop this anytime, he had said the night of their engagement. But why should she? And why shouldn’t she build something new in the meantime?

  She felt tucked into multiple stories now. No longer the center of the universe. Sleepily, she stretched her bare toe
s against the clean sheets. She stretched herself the way “Träumerei” stretched toward sleep. The slide, with vibrato at the top. She felt happy.

  She could drill new phrases into them—he doesn’t, they don’t—until the phrases sounded right; or she could go back to basics, so they understood. Not mere rote. She would do both. She would need to teach the concepts of subject and verb, of nouns and pronouns, of singular and plural. Tonight we learn to conjugate, to put together subject and verb in a certain conventional pattern. What is a convention? She would explain it all.

  Aftermath: Arcola at the Dressing Table

  ARCOLA TOOK OFF HER BRAID AND PUT IT IN A DRAWER. She checked her face for any sign of a pimple: none. She checked her nails, painted plum, for any sign of a chip: none. That Charles, so tall and good-looking. She wondered how long he’d been out of school; he might be just about her age, even if he was a dropout student. He looked like he’d worked—long flat arm muscles like a man. Somebody like that, a hard worker like her father, if Charles could get some education—that wouldn’t be bad. He’d have to have an education though. Her daddy insisted on that. I ain’t been twenty years at TCI saving for you, then you marry some bum. Pretty don’t count. You learn, and you marry somebody what wants to learn.

  Arcola thought she had the most wonderful parents in the world. One time when they were doing the dishes together, her mother told her they weren’t ever going to have any more children. Everything is for you, her mother said. We wanted to provide right for you so we stopped when you came along.

  She, Arcola Anderson, had taught in the same room with white teachers. It was easy. Arcola looked in the mirror and smiled at herself. She liked them.

  She reached for the dark blue glass cologne bottle—Evening in Paris—and dabbed a little fluid behind each ear. The spots of cologne felt cool. Now she had some scent to dream on. She picked up her comb, held it close to her ear, turned her head a bit to the side. Then quickly, she slid her thumb down the teeth. The sound was magical, like fairy music. In the mirror, she watched her eyes light up.

  Aftermath: Home for the Night

  WHEN LIONEL PARRISH CAME HOME, HE HOPED TO GOD there wasn’t any of Matilda’s scent on him. He’d taken a bath before he’d dressed, and he’d taken care to buy Matilda Ivory, just like Jenny insisted on at home. He preferred the grit of Lava. Made a man feel clean. But his wife, Jenny, said he wasn’t no laboring man;he didn’t need Lava.

  The children all liked to play with Ivory because it floated. But Jenny didn’t let them melt off too much of the soap with floating it around in the tub. For the youngest, Jenny had made a little red paper sail on a toothpick and stuck it into the flat of the soap. She let Andy push up water walls with his hands to move his boat across the tub. Lionel liked to think of his littlest boy, naked and plump, sailing his cake of soap with its red flag around the bathtub, but that was several years ago when Andy was three. He himself had grown up washing in a galvanized tub in the kitchen, with the water heated on the stove.

  “Hi, honey,” Lionel said softly, and softly he closed the home door behind him.

  His wife got up from the sofa, left her Ebony magazine there, softly put her arms around him; she breathed in a deep breath. And yes, he decided, he’d pleasure her, too.

  “Honey,” he said, “I hired two Birmingham white girls tonight, both with B.A. degrees.”

  JENNY THOUGHTHe’s so fresh, so fresh, so fresh and sweet smelling to the rhythm of his thrusting. How she loved to lie perfectly still—she was a good woman—and the bliss of it! She needed him so bad, all of him, and surely he knew that, her lying so still and good, how she needed this and would honor him with as many children as he saw fit to place within her. But this night, he pulled out and left his puddle outside on her stomach.

  What was this sorrow, these two little tears like two orange seeds squeezing out of the corners of her eyes? Why did crying come as though something were sad? Why, indeed, when she loved him so and she could hear the breathing of their sleeping children?

  Cahaba

  THE BRIDGE OVER THE CAHABA RIVER WAS A NIGHT meeting place for Ryder’s friends—all the bigs, the Exalted Cyclops, maybe the Imperial Wizard, Ryder’s closer friends, Dynamite Bob Chambliss, Tommy Blanton, Bobby Cherry. When they sat together on the riverbank, sometimes their cupped cigarettes flared in the dark like little handheld campfires. When a flashlight cast a slat of light, the large shadows of the men loomed behind them. But this sunny afternoon, the riverbank was deserted where Highway 280 crossed the Cahaba.

  Ryder had a ten-cent-store bamboo pole over his shoulder and a Maxwell House coffee can full of earthworms. Little Bobby had dug the worms for him from the backyard and begged to come along, but Ryder had said no. Ryder smiled to think of his older son’s desperate whispering: “Tommy’s too little.” Bobby said they could slip off and leave Tommy in the sandbox. But Ryder wanted to be alone. He had wanted some peace and quiet, even from both his sons, carefully named for the men who were his friends.

  The Cahaba was muddy and slow moving, but he’d heard you could get small catfish from it. He’d never been fishing as a boy. His father was too worthless to do anything with him. Once Ryder himself learned the tricks of fishing, he would take Bobby with him, and Tommy, too, when he was older. Maybe Lee and Shirley would pack a picnic, and they’d all come. She could bring the red-checked cloth they put on the kitchen table for Sunday dinner.

  Since the riverbank looked muddy and a little slippery, Ryder moved back from the water and walked among the saplings edging the river. The rocks along the river edge were coated with slimy red-brown mud. No, there was a pretty flat one in the shade with moss on it. He’d heard you could catch fish on the quiet side of a big rock, that fish liked to rest there.

  The whole woods were quiet down where he was. The car motors up on 280 sounded distant, as though they came from a world next door, not this one. Thick with their summer green leaves, the trees completely masked the road. There was a big sycamore close to the water, barkless and white from twenty feet on up toward the sky. He broke off one of the big, low-hanging flat leaves and laid it over the palm of his hand. The leaf was covered with a stiff fuzz. This green hand was bigger than his own hand, and he smiled a little, playing with it. The stem where it had detached from its twig had a clever little cup shape, very tiny.

  Standing on the bank, Ryder tossed the leaf into the water and watched it float. It bumped along, getting caught occasionally on black, waterlogged sticks crusted with white scallops of decay. When the points of the sycamore leaf brushed a rock, they twirled the leaf back into the slow current, like fingertips pushing off from the wet stone. A film of water on one rock magnified a brush of gold otherwise indiscernible in the brown rock flank.

  Ryder walked on and noticed the telltale three leaves of poison ivy climbing the tree trunks and springing through the sparse grass, but he had on long pants and work boots. No need to worry. As a boy, he’d never once caught poison ivy. The one time he went camping with the Scouts, they’d nearly all got poison ivy, but he was immune. The leader said Ryder must have a natural immunity, and everybody had looked at him respectfully. He had almost been embarrassed and had looked down at the wolf-head slide of his neckerchief. Reckon we’ll see any wolf? he had asked shyly, and the leader explained in a kind way that the wolves were all out west. Who knew? Maybe the troop would raise money and go west someday, to Yellowstone. All of us? Ryder had asked.

  Despite the shade of the tall trees, Ryder was hot, and he took off his black cowboy hat and used it to fan his face. As he walked, he was careful to carry his humped, metal lunch box on the level. The can of worms was at one end, with wax paper over it held tight with rubber bands, and his ham-and-cheese sandwich was in the other end. He had some peanut-butter cookies, too—with the crisscross on top—that Lee had baked for the kids. For just a moment, Ryder missed Bobby, his older son. Maybe Ryder would get Bobby a little black hat like his own. He could see Bobby beside him, his
face tilted up catching the sun. But suppose they didn’t catch any fish, this being the first time? Ryder hadn’t wanted to face how disappointed Bobby would be. Bobby believed Ryder could do anything. Bobby loved his mom, too. Devoted. He was a devoted child to his parents. Wild blackberries glistened black and inviting off in a sun-drenched clearing.

  Here in the woods, by the brown river, Ryder could think about all that, about what was good in his life. Sometimes he used his fishing pole to push aside the poison ivy or to hold back a briar. Out in the water, he saw a green glass Coke bottle floating along. In the hump of his lunch box, held up by the wire clasp, he had a thermos of milk. He could almost taste it, good and cold, washing down the bread and mayonnaise. He liked hearing the sound of his own feet moving quietly through the underbrush—just him and the woods.

  A large brown rock, big as an elephant’s back, lolled in the water, and Ryder decided he’d try standing there to fish. He took a giant step onto the rock and walked easily a few steps up its slope. Trash—milk cartons, brown sacks, even a muddy pair of navy pants—lodged against the far bank. From this height Ryder could see maybe an inch or two down into the brown water, and he saw a swarm of minnows, like big gnats, not too far out. The top layer of the water was a little more clear. He lifted the flap of his shirt pocket and took out the little brown envelope with three hooks of varying sizes in it.

  Very carefully, he began to separate the hooks. It wouldn’t be fun to have to work the barbed tip of a hook out of a finger. Wait! He should have brought wire cutters—just clip off the head of the hook if he should need to, instead of drawing it back through the flesh. He pictured the wire cutters among the other tools, dark with grease, in the toolbox at the service station.

  Yesterday evening, a woman had driven up and bought thirty-five cents worth of gas. She had said, Do you know why I buy gas at Texaco? It’s because you support the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturdays. Her friend beside her on the front seat, a girl with a short haystack haircut, had gulped with laughter. Crazy girls. The driver was so flat-chested she looked too young to drive. They hadn’t meant any harm. He’d pumped the thirty-five cents, cleaned the windshield, and said, “Will that be all, ma’am?”