“Elikah, there wasn’t any kind of curse.” I tried to sound reasonable.
“True or not? True or not! When Duncan McVay was struck by lightning, the only words she spoke were that Mary would drown?”
“Elikah, she’d been struck by li—”
He slapped the table so hard it made the salt cellar jump and topple. Salt spilled over the table and onto the floor.
“True or not?” he demanded.
I didn’t answer. I focused on my shoes on the floor. They’d fallen on their side, revealing the nearly new soles. For some reason the sight of them, lying the way they were, made me want to cry.
“Mattie, I think you’d better answer me.”
“Not,” I said without looking at him.
I didn’t see his hand, but I bent down to pick up the shoes and caught the blow on the top of my head. Even so, it knocked me off balance and I fell to my knees. He pushed me the rest of the way over with his foot.
“Stay away from that woman. Everyone in town knows she’s a slut. That husband of hers knows it. I know it. Now you know it. Stay clear of them. And if I ever hear of you going anywhere with them again, you’ll be more sorry than you ever want to believe.”
Looking up at him from the floor, I could see the redness of his face, the hardness of his eyes. I kept perfectly still. To move would have been to invite another punishment. No fear, but no foolish bravado. He could hurt me and no one would say a word. I was his wife, and I had embarrassed him by my behavior.
“You hear me?”
“Yes, Elikah.”
He stepped to my head, his foot on my hair. “Belt or switch?”
I couldn’t get up, and I couldn’t move. His toe was right beside my ear. I had to look up at him. “I think I can remember without a whipping.”
He knelt down and pulled me to a sitting position. His breath was harsh with whiskey and tobacco. “I think you remember better when you can’t sit down for a day or two.”
“Elikah, please …” I stopped myself. Begging excited him. Then it would be more than a beating. “Belt.”
“My daddy never gave me a choice,” he said, going into the bedroom and coming back with the strap he used to sharpen his razor at the barbershop. “No, he never gave me a choice. Now pull up that skirt.”
Seven
THE month of July passed. August brought its own lethargy and the paralyzing fear that I was pregnant. I had heard that JoHanna and Duncan had gone up to Fitler to stay with one of her relatives. At first I was glad they were gone. That day, after we got back from the creek, I’d felt as if something bad had touched me, just a brush across my skin, but a taint. Mary Lincoln’s death, Duncan suddenly talking, then Elikah, it had all been too much. I had my own life to manage, and I had to concentrate on that.
It was a Wednesday morning when I woke up too hot and sick. Elikah was still asleep, his hand on my thigh. I didn’t want to move, didn’t want to wake him. But I had to get to the outhouse or mess the bed. Inching away from his hand, I finally slipped free and hurried outside.
The still August morning was close, suffocating, but I sat on the swing in the gray light and tried not to think about nausea in the morning. How many times had I seen it? Seven, to be exact. Seven brothers and sisters. Seven more mouths to feed. With a child, I could never escape.
The sun crested the horizon with a hot golden kiss. The nausea passed and I went in and started breakfast, praying the smell of bacon wouldn’t set me off again. I had only to get Elikah out the door to the barbershop. If I could manage that, I’d survive. One step at a time. Then I was going over to Jeb Fairley’s.
“You’re mighty quiet.” Elikah watched me as he ate his breakfast. “The toast is perfect.”
“Good.” I buttered a piece for myself and risked a small bite.
“Vernell is driving over to Mobile and catching the train to New Orleans Saturday. I thought maybe we’d go with him and Janelle.”
The bite of toast got stuck to the roof of my mouth. “New Orleans?” I managed. “What for?”
“Just to go. It’s a real old city. A hundred years ago Andrew Jackson and his men rode all over this place on their way to the Battle of New Orleans. Vernell said there are cannons and battlefields.” He held his fork in midair as he talked, as if he wanted to convince me, but also didn’t want to lose a minute of the morning. “We might ride one of those riverboats.”
JoHanna had told me about the riverboats that once moved up and down the Pascagoula River to Fitler with their cargos. Fitler had been a boom town with gamblers, whores, and a French restaurant with a chef from New Orleans. On one of my visits JoHanna had talked some about New Orleans, and just the way she’d said the name made me want to go there. There was music and dancing and an entire city of colored folks with white blood known as high yellows. The streets were made of brick, and Napoleon had stayed there, as well as Andy Jackson and Jean Laffite, the pirate. There was voodoo and cemeteries with graves on top of the ground, and markets where exotic vegetables and clothes could be examined and bought.
“This Saturday?” My excitement had far outstripped the drawback that Janelle Baxley was going along.
“We’ll have to go early. Hell, maybe we could go on over to Mobile Friday night. Stay in one of those fancy hotels by the river. Then spend Saturday night in New Orleans. Would you like that, Mattie?”
Elikah could be both kind and generous, seemingly without reason. This trip was his gift to me, like the dress and shoes. Something he realized I lacked. I would have danced with Satan for the chance to go somewhere. “Yes, I’d like it a lot.”
He grinned and reached across the table to catch my hand. “I made the right decision when I married you. You’re a good girl.”
He got up, snapped his suspenders up, put on his coat, and then bent down to kiss me on the cheek.
“Have a good day.” My smile was genuine.
“How about some snap beans tonight?”
“I’ll see what Bruner has on his wagon.” He was the old man who drove into town each morning about ten o’clock with the vegetables he harvested from his farm.
“Next summer we’ll have our own garden,” Elikah said. “Your daddy said you had a green thumb.”
I wanted to tell him Jojo wasn’t my daddy, but I’d already told him that enough times that he knew it. Jojo would have told him I had wings and could fly if he’d thought Elikah would pay more, but the truth was I could generally make anything flourish. Just as long as it wasn’t a child.
The screen door slammed and he was gone, walking the few blocks to the barbershop. We didn’t have a car, just one old horse, Mable, who was mostly retired. Since we lived in town we could get everything we needed on foot or have it delivered. I never minded walking up to Royhill’s Market and Mara Nyman’s bakery. As soon as Elikah was out the door I’d determined to go over to Jeb’s, but his little surprise about New Orleans had changed things. He wanted snap beans for supper, and he also had a real taste for the hot, light yeast rolls that Mara made fresh each day. I’d been saving pennies from leftover bills and had nearly ten cents, more than enough for some fresh rolls for Elikah’s supper, but I had to get the order in early. Mara’s goods didn’t last long, and it was a first come, first served basis.
In my haste I forgot my concern about babies or anything else. I felt fine. The sickness had passed, and it was surely something I’d eaten the night before. I took off my apron and ran out the door without even washing the breakfast dishes. New Orleans! New Orleans! The name of the magic city exploded with each of my pounding feet. On a train! I was going to New Orleans!
I was so excited that I absolutely forgot about running in public and was speeding along the street, my hair having long since given up its hold on the pins and fallen about my shoulders. I was halfway to Mara’s when I heard the laughter. It was a thick, rich sound like cane syrup on a cold winter day. Suddenly, I was the fly, trapped in that amber haze of syrup. If Elikah heard that I was running down
the street, my hair all down my back like a wild thing, he’d decide I wasn’t grown enough to go to New Orleans. I stopped like I’d hit a wall, then turned slowly to see who was laughing at me.
Floyd was a hulking young man, thick through the shoulders and with big, bulging muscles. Had it not been for the slow smile of a child and the gray eyes that held both wonder and sorrow, he would have been the most ideal specimen of a male in town. As it was, he was a loon with the face and body of a god. He’d been leaning in the doorway of the telephone exchange, and he walked over to me. Without thinking a thing about it, he reached out and picked up a strand of my hair, admiring it in the early sunlight.
“Pretty,” he said, smiling right into my face. “You looked like a princess running in the sun.”
“Floyd.” I backed away. I’d avoided him since I got to town, afraid of my own pity and then ashamed of my fear. Daddy had taught me that mother animals in the wild destroy their own babies when they aren’t healthy. Floyd had been given life, then abandoned on the doorstep of the Baptist church. Now he lived on the salary Axim Moses paid him in the boot shop and the handouts of different people in town. Maybe it was how close I came to his circumstances that made me fear him so.
“Mattie.” He grinned wider. “You’re Duncan’s friend. So am I.”
“Yes.” I smiled back at him, warmed by the total lack of malice in his own gaze.
“Duncan and JoHanna are gone to Fitler. They’ll be back today. Duncan’s coming so I can finish the story of the woman who lives under the bridge by Courting Creek. She’s dead, you know, but she lives there and waits for her love to return. He went off to the big war and never came home. So she drowned herself by jumping off the bridge. And now she waits for him to come home.”
He started to reach out for my hair again, but I held up my hand and he stopped instantly.
“I wasn’t goin’ to hurt you.” His face grew solemn. “I’m big but I’m not stupid.”
“I know.” I quickly twisted my hair back into a bun and tried to knot it so it wouldn’t come down. I looked up and down Redemption, glad that the streets were empty. Only a few patrons had been seated in the café when I went by. Chances are no one had seen Floyd touch my hair. He was a harmless man-child, but I wasn’t so certain Elikah would see it that way.
“Tell me about this woman who lives under the bridge.” Courting Bridge was only ten feet above the flow of the shallow stream. Hardly far enough for a fatal fall, and the water certainly wasn’t deep enough for a full-grown woman to drown unless she stuck her head in a sand wallow. I wondered where Floyd had gotten this morbid flight of fancy.
“Her name was Klancy, with a K, and she was Otto Kretzler’s niece. She’d come here from a place called T-r-i-s-t-e over in Germany before the war got so bad. She and her family didn’t believe the Germans were right, so they left all of their stuff and came here. When her folks took sick and died coming down the Mississippi, she came on to her uncle’s and finished school here. The man she fell in love with was a teacher, Harvey Finch. And he went off to fight and got killed in one of the big battles. She—”
“Wait a minute, Floyd.” His wealth of detail had me flustered. “Is this true?”
He nodded. “Every word.”
“Even the part about the woman living under the bridge?”
“That, too. That’s the best part.”
“But she’s dead.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “So? She’s a ghost. That’s the best part of the story, and you can see her on a clear night when the stars are shining. She’s standing on the side of the bridge, looking down into the swollen creek. Horses won’t cross the bridge at night sometimes, ‘cause they can sense her even when a human can’t. Old Doc Westfall like to got kilt tryin’ to make Jezebel go over the bridge last year when Mrs. Conner had that stillborn baby.”
It was broad daylight on a hot August morning, yet a chill cooled my arms. “That’s tragic, Floyd.”
“She was a pretty lady. Like you.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t know if he was talking about Mrs. Conner or the departed Klancy, and I didn’t want to ask.
“You look like a girl. JoHanna said you were cheated out of your childhood.”
I tried not to show my surprise. Did JoHanna really say that, or was it more of Floyd’s embellishments?
“She said you had po-tential.”
The way he pronounced the word, I knew he didn’t understand what it meant, and I also knew that JoHanna had really said those things.
“She and Duncan are coming home today. And Pecos. That’s an ornery rooster.”
The entire time we’d been talking, Floyd didn’t move at all. It was as if his jaw were the only thing lubricated in his body. But suddenly he moved, swinging around to stalk Clyde Odom as he came out of the café and started to come our way.
Sure enough, I saw his hands hovering an inch or two above the handles of wooden guns he wore in too-small holsters on his hips. I hadn’t noticed them before, but now he was in the gunslinger’s crouch, watching warily as Clyde approached. I almost felt as if I should take cover, and then I blushed at the foolishness of my thoughts. Floyd might be an idiot, but he’d managed to snooker me twice in the space of ten minutes, once with a story and now with his gunfighting.
“Easy, Floyd,” Clyde said as he came forward. “I’m in a peaceable mood today.”
“On the count of three,” Floyd insisted.
“Not this morning.”
Clyde looked at me, embarrassment plain on his face. So he’d been encouraging Floyd in this farce so he could laugh at him, but he didn’t want to do it in front of me.
“Go ahead, Mr. Odom. I always enjoy a good, fair fight.” The words flew out of my mouth and struck him full in the heart, dripping as they were with the poison of sarcasm.
“One,” Floyd said, his gaze locked on Clyde.
Clyde dropped his bundle of mail to the dirt and dropped into the stance of a fighter.
“Two.”
I stepped back against the wooden wall of the telephone exchange building and let the air out of my lungs.
“Three!”
Floyd’s hands were a blur of action as both guns came up and he made the explosive sounds of gunfire.
Clyde clutched his chest, spun around two times, and then staggered over to the building where I stood and fell against the boards not two inches from me. His hand brushed fully across my breasts.
“It’s a game, Mrs. Mills,” he said in a whisper. “Just a game with an idiot boy.”
Aloud he said, “You got me, Floyd. I’m a goner.”
Floyd lifted up first one gun, then the other and blew into the barrels as if he were clearing smoke. Eyes still squinted in concentration, he put them back in the holster and came over to me, ignoring Clyde Odom as if he truly were dead.
“I have to go to work. Mr. Axim has some new leather for me to tool. It’s beautiful. I’m going to make the finest pair of boots in the world.”
“I’m sure you will.” I moved away from both of them. I wasn’t certain who was crazier, but Clyde Odom was certainly more dangerous.
“Give Elikah my regards,” Clyde said, standing away from the wall and dropping a bow at me. “He has fine taste in women.”
I turned and fled, not caring that I wasn’t supposed to run in town. But I wasn’t quick enough to avoid hearing Floyd’s gentle reprimand.
“You made her scared, Clyde. You shouldna done that.”
I ran the two blocks to Mara’s and fled into the warm, womanly smell of fresh bread baking.
Eight
THE car trip to Mobile was hot, hard, and boring. Only the ferry across Bad Creek roused me out of a lethargy that was part heat and part the fast growing concern about my condition. The morning nausea had gone away until the Friday we were to leave for Mobile. It returned with a fury that had left me spent and terrified.
In the hotel I washed my face in cool water and ate some of the icy watermelon that E
likah had gone to fetch me from the docks. The cool, sweet melon and the kindness from Elikah were the perfect cure. By early afternoon I was eager to see the city that had grown up beside the big Mobile River.
At first we wandered around docks and watched the men called stevedores unloading enormous boxes of cargo. Elikah was drawn to the bustle, to the undercurrent of men involved in men’s work and the big ships groaning against the moorings. It was finally the sun that drove us back from the waterfront. Elikah let me pick a direction, and we wandered past the business district inland toward the residences.
Much older than Jexville, Mobile was sheltered by huge oaks dangling with moss. The branches laced together over the downtown streets giving some protection from the August sun. Walking along the shaded streets I peeked into the beautiful homes with their wide, beveled glass doors. It was like opening a book to see the polished wood floors, curio cabinets filled with painted plates and cups and saucers, and banisters that led to the second floor of a home where people lived in wealth and graciousness. Surely these people never committed an act of cruelty or meanness. They had everything. There was no need to hurt others. I thought of JoHanna. And Duncan. Their home was not this big, but it had the same air about it. People surrounded by color and comfort. And love.
Elikah waited for me as I sneaked up on the wide front porches to look in. My curiosity amused him, but at last he could stand it no longer and he pulled me down the street saying the people who lived in the houses would think we were beggars or thieves if I didn’t quit staring.
I didn’t care. I wanted to drink in the colors, the reds and blues and yellows that made such exotic pictures on something so common as a plate.
Janelle and Vernell had gone their separate ways, and we didn’t see them again that day. Elikah said they’d gone to visit one of Janelle’s cousins, but there was something in his tone that made me wonder if he was lying. I didn’t care where they’d gone. Janelle made me feel young and stupid and I was glad to be rid of her even if it meant that I was alone with Elikah. Beneath the shelter of the oaks, among the bustle of the busy streets that ran between two-story homes or the brick business buildings all crowded together, tall and indestructible, Elikah was different. On the downtown streets I noticed how the women looked at him, eyes cast down but moving up quickly for another taste of him. For the first time in my marriage, I valued my place at his side. He held my hand as if I truly belonged to him.
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