Touched

by Carolyn Haines

  That night, in a strange bed in a hotel so fancy it had an elevator, I thought I’d never rest. But as soon as I pulled the crisp clean sheet over me, I was asleep. I didn’t wake up until Elikah touched my hip, murmuring that it was morning.

  The nausea was gone again, and I was starving. Elikah said they would bring food up to the room for us, but I wanted to eat in the dining room with the patterned carpet of frosty white leaf designs on dark green and the two chandeliers that looked as if the lights were alive.

  Electricity. I’d never stayed in a place where lights burned day and night just because they were pretty. I’d heard the lines were going to be run to Jexville. Janelle had said so, in fact, but I’d never bothered to consider that Elikah might have it come to the house. To flip a switch and have light in my home. Elikah’s look said it was possible. As soon as breakfast was done, we left the dirty dishes on the table, got our things, and went to the station.

  All thoughts of Mobile were left behind as we boarded the train. Almost as soon as we were seated, it began to rock and lurch us to New Orleans with a speed that was too fast through the stretches of Mississippi beach towns and too slow through the monotony of the pine forests.

  Janelle sat across from me, a secret trapped in her blue eyes. To avoid her, I feigned sleep. I watched her through slitted lids with a growing despair. She waited for me to awaken. When Elikah and Vernell got up together and walked out of the car, she could wait no longer.

  “We’re going to the Quarter,” she said, her lips so close to mine I could feel her shape the air.

  “The Quarter?” Curiosity won out over dislike.

  “The old part of town where they gamble and drink.”

  “They do that in Jexville.” It was forbidden for the women to say a word about such things, and I was pleased to feel Janelle draw back in her seat and give me a prissy look. We weren’t supposed to acknowledge those things, not even among ourselves.

  “They do it in public. There are street women and music and dancing.” She leaned down again. “Vernell said he would take me dancing if I swore not to tell anyone!”

  I sat up. “Dancing?” The image of Duncan came to me, shiny shoes flying in the dust, dark eyes blazing with mischief and delight. “You think he really will?”

  “I’m sure. Elikah is a wonderful dancer.”

  I leaned back against the seat. “Elikah won’t even listen to a gramophone.”

  “This is New Orleans! We’re not in Jexville. No one will know what we do.”

  I looked up to find Elikah standing behind Janelle’s seat staring into my eyes. A half-smile quirked his lips up on the right, making him more handsome than ever.

  “Ready for the city, girl?” he asked.

  I couldn’t answer. The way he was looking at me was both terrifying and exciting, as if the light of Louisiana pouring through the train window had given me some new worth.

  “Of course she is, Elikah. Don’t be silly. We’re so ready we’re about to pop.” Janelle laughed, a feminine sound that seemed to cling to a man and wind around him.

  “We’ll be there in less than ten minutes. That big water we went over was Lake Ponchartrain. It won’t be long now.” He went back to find Vernell.

  It had never occurred to me that Elikah had been to New Orleans before. He’d made it sound almost as if this were his first trip, too. But then he hadn’t said that either. It was just a curiosity I pondered while I gathered our picnic basket and things and concentrated on not meeting Janelle’s looks.

  Dancing. I’d never even considered such a thing where Elikah was involved. I hated the idea that Janelle knew more about my husband than I did, but I also had to keep in mind that Janelle said things she didn’t know for a fact. If Elikah wanted to dance, he would certainly let me know.

  The train stopped and we got off, caught in a swirl of movement and bustle that swept us along the boarded platform of the station and out into the cobbled street. It was like walking into the page of a book. Men in suits, and women in the dark clothes of the office, swept by on urgent errands while cars honked and the harnesses of horses and mules mingled with a hundred other sounds. The buildings themselves were brick or plaster painted in muted colors ripened by age. Before I could catch my breath, Elikah took my arm and swept me toward a large wagonlike car with a lot of seats.

  “It’s a streetcar, Mattie. You’ll love it,” he whispered, giving my arm a little reassuring squeeze. And I did. I knelt on the seat and looked out the window as we lumbered and clanged our way on tracks in the middle of the street all through the heart of the towering city.

  Janelle had not lied. Elikah and Vernell had booked us rooms in one of the oldest hotels in New Orleans, on Dumaine Street, a place filled with golden light and furniture that seemed to hold the glow of the afternoon sun half an inch deep in the wood. Even the bedspread shimmered with its own internal light. I had never been in such a beautiful place. Outside the open window, the sounds of the city beckoned, strange exotic languages, the cries of vendors and music that was happy and free.

  The four of us walked the streets, watching artists ply their wares while music and laughter came out of places where men drank. I was numbed by the sights and sounds. We ate bowls of spicy food with shrimp and crab and turtle, a mixture that sounded awful but tasted better than anything I’d ever put in my mouth. We went in shops where jewelry as old as England and France could be bought, or merely picked up and examined. At Elikah’s insistence, we went into a dress shop and I bought a new dress. He sat in a chair while I went into a dressing room, this one complete with a stool to sit on and a mirror, and tried on the red dress Elikah had selected. It was stylish, with short, filmy sleeves and a waist that dropped to my hip bones. Struck dumb by his selection, I put it on and went out. Elikah nodded. The dress was mine.

  And finally it was night.

  Janelle and Vernell had once again disappeared, leaving Elikah and me alone in the damp heat of August. Our room had a balcony where we could sit and look over the street. It was as if the people of the Quarter had all gone home and slipped into new skins. They moved with a different rhythm, more of a glide. On several street corners women dressed in flashy clothes stood, waiting for a cab while live music drifted around them from the open doors of what Elikah called “joints.” Janelle said they were clubs, like the one Tommy Ladnier ran in Biloxi.

  “Why don’t you put on that red dress?” Elikah said. He was sitting on one of the little ornate iron chairs that matched the balcony railing where his feet were propped. He was smoking a cigarette from a pack he’d bought at a corner store that was filled with the strong smells of cheeses and the ripe green olives that I’d never seen before.

  “Okay.” I was shy. The dress made me look older, like a woman. Sexy. It would look wonderful on the dance floor, the skirt floating around my thighs, shorter than anything I owned. Frisky. As if I had suddenly become part of the strange, exotic night.

  The material slid over my arms and head and torso, and I remembered the night after the Fourth of July barbecue when I’d poured the cold water over my head and felt as if I’d left behind more than the heat and dirt of the day. The red dress was the same. I put on the stockings he’d bought with the dress, and the strange red shoes that were so dainty and a little hard to walk in. I twisted up my long hair. I’d gotten better by examining the way JoHanna did hers. The woman who looked back at me in the lighted bathroom mirror was not Mattie Mills. This was another creature, one who looked almost pretty. If only I’d had the nerve to ask for a tube of lipstick. But Elikah had once seemed so disapproving of such things. I bit my lips to make them redder and then opened the bathroom door and walked out.

  Elikah hung over the iron railing around the balcony and stared down at the street, his body tensed with desire to be down there, to be part of the night in a place where no one from Jexville could see. He turned slowly, tossing the butt of his cigarette into the street below.

  “Well, Mattie,” he said, h
is eyes moving over me as if he assessed each point. “My little bride has been hiding some kind of woman.”

  “Is it okay?” I wanted to rush toward him, to get so close he couldn’t stare at me in that way that made me feel naked and vulnerable. The way he looked at me was so much more intimate than a touch.

  “Red is your color.” He motioned me out to the balcony and then handed me the glass of whiskey he was drinking. “Now take a sip. If you’re going to look like a full-grown city woman, you’d better taste the pleasures of such a life.”

  The whiskey smelled terrible and tasted worse, and it burned. But I swallowed it and nodded, handing the glass back to Elikah. Maybe things would be different now that he could see me as more than a child. Maybe if I acted grown-up, he’d treat me like a woman, like a wife.

  “That’s some of the best whiskey money can buy. Tommy Ladnier delivers over here in New Orleans. I hear he’s making a handsome profit, if some of the New Orleans gangsters don’t have him killed off.” Elikah laughed and handed me the glass.

  I swallowed again, barely able to stop the urge to spit the stuff out.

  Elikah motioned to the other chair. “Sit down, Mattie. I was thinking maybe we’d go to one of the clubs and hear some music. Maybe dance. How does that sound?”

  I sat on the edge of the chair. The whiskey had sent a rush of heat to my face, and I wasn’t certain I could manage an answer and maintain my grown-up dignity. “That would be … lovely.”

  He laughed out loud, but there was the ring of pleasure instead of mockery in it. “Lovely. Well, you’ve budded all of a sudden into a young lady. And it’s a good thing.” He chuckled again as he handed me the glass. “I told everyone in town you’d make a good wife, and here I get a lady in the bargain.”

  “I want to make you a good wife, Elikah.” A wave of earnestness swept over me, and I blurted out the words. He’d shamed me and hurt me, but that could all be put in the past. It was the future I wanted. Something of my own worth having, a handsome husband, a home; maybe, if we were really happy, I wouldn’t mind thinking about a child.

  “That’s good, Mattie. You try hard, I’ll give you that.” He was suddenly serious, motioning for me to drink more whiskey.

  I did, almost coughing, but managing to swallow it all. The warmth burned down my throat and then back up until it settled at the base of my skull, where fuzzy tentacles of warmth reached around and up my cheeks to the top of my head.

  “Let’s go see about some music.” He offered me a hand and I took it, almost stumbling.

  “Elikah, I don’t know how to dance.” I wanted to tell him before we got there and I embarrassed him.

  “I think we can remedy that, Mattie.” And he opened the door into the hallway and the waiting night. We stepped out into the street, moving from pool of light to pool of light just as the people I’d watched from the balcony. The whiskey had made me light-headed, free, and the night and the city were like a disguise.

  The music crept out the doors of the bars and moved along the old sidewalk in a thick fog that we walked into. Suddenly, it was as if the sounds were all around me, inside me, speaking to my bones.

  Elikah steered me into a club through a shuttered door. We didn’t even go to a table. Elikah led me straight to the dance floor and pulled me into his arms. The music was slow, languid, and seemed to drift with the deep sounds of a giant fiddle, the night vibrating like the thick strings. Elikah’s hand on my back was firm, and he pressed and released while he guided with the other until I felt my own body slide into the easy rhythm.

  In the darkened room others were dancing, and there was the sound of laughter and talk and the smell of cigarette smoke and perfume and the feel of Elikah’s hand drawing me closer until I was pressed against him and moving in a way that somehow wasn’t decent but was too good to stop.

  “You’re a natural, Mattie,” Elikah whispered in my ear, his breath a shiver of pleasure.

  I couldn’t answer. The music had pulled me deep inside where I shut my eyes and let his body tell mine what to do.

  We went to a dark table where a woman brought us drinks in tall glasses filled with ice. The liquid was sweet, cold, easy to swallow. And we danced again, the skirt of the dress brushing the backs of my legs like a whisper while Elikah’s warm hands touched and guided. I gave myself to him, to the music and the night and the strange dark city that had somehow become a deep blue note spiraling from the mouth of a horn.

  I don’t know how long we danced, but it seemed that my bones had softened in my flesh. At last, Elikah put his arm around me and walked me outside into the night.

  “I think you’re drunk,” he said, laughing as he held me. “Can you walk?”

  “Maybe.” I lifted my leg and removed first one shoe, then the other. On my bare feet I had better balance. “I can walk.”

  Elikah’s laughter was like a kiss. In response, I put my arm around his neck and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “I’m having a wonderful time.”

  “And it’s only going to get better,” he promised as he led me back to the room.

  Inside the bedroom he closed the door and helped me out of the beautiful red dress and into my gown. Then he walked me to the bed where I tumbled into it, laughing at the feeling of floating and the pleasure of the night.

  Elikah pulled the sheet up over me and walked out to the balcony. Lying on my side I could see him, hands braced on the rail, staring down at the city. It was only ten o’clock. Late by Jexville standards, but early by the clock that ticked in the City that Care Forgot. JoHanna had told me that name. I knew exactly what it meant now.

  “Elikah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aren’t you tired?” I wanted him in bed beside me, had grown used to the feel of him there.

  “No, I’m not tired.”

  “Go on out,” I told him. “It’s been a wonderful day.”

  He turned to me, and I thought he might be mad. He didn’t need me to say what he could do. He came to me and caught the placket of my nightgown in his fingers, holding the material gently, as if he were afraid he would bruise it.

  “Okay,” he whispered, then dropped his hand and left the room without his hat.

  I got out of bed and went to the balcony and watched him cross the street, his boots sharp and clear on the cobbled brick streets. One of the ladies standing by a building stepped up to speak to him. He laughed and walked on, disappearing around the corner where the music seemed to come from.

  Even as I stood there, after ten o’clock, the city seemed to grow more and more alive. Gas lamps on posts cast small pools of light, and I could watch the anonymous people move from pool to pool, like minnows in a vat, shifting without making progress.

  The music teased me, reminding me of Duncan and her promise to teach me to dance. My feet were still throbbing from the beautiful new shoes and the dancing. It was all like a dream, and I closed my eyes and let the city invade my head.

  When I found my head sinking to my chest while I sat in an iron chair on the balcony, I got up and went to bed. The sheets were heavy cotton, cool and smelling of sunshine. Crawling under the covers, I fell instantly asleep.

  When the door to the room opened, I mumbled something to Elikah. The room was dark, unfamiliar, and my sleep as thick and heavy as a quilt spread over me.

  There was the sound of his footsteps, a slight hesitation in the pattern that brought me fully awake. He came in with a host of smells, among them liquor and a heavy, sweet odor. Perfume. Perfectly still, I listened and watched the darkness.

  Step, shuffle, step, step. Smaller, quicker steps that sounded as if he were being blown into the room. A confusion of noises, not like at home. But even in the strange darkness of the hotel room, I knew he was drunk.

  The fear was like the prick of a needle. A warning. Elikah had been like a different man. In one day, I’d fallen a little bit in love with my husband, but I was afraid of him when he was drunk. We were alone in a city where no one knew us, no
one cared.

  Except we weren’t alone.

  I heard her then, the breathless giggle of her laughter. “Shush, Eli.” She giggled as she made the sound. “She’s asleep.”

  “And we’re going to wake her up,” he answered, laughing also.

  Nine

  THE rocking of the train was soothing, a sound and movement beyond my control. Without lifting my forty-pound hand, I was hurtling through time and space. I sat with my face turned to the morning sun, remembering how it was when Daddy worked the night shift and he would come home in the mornings. Mama would be up cooking bacon and biscuits, then making the red-eye gravy he loved, and I would hear them talking, the low current of their voices much like the movement of the train, the feel of the morning sun coming through the window on the clean sheets of my bed where Callie and Jane still slept beside me. I loved to listen to the kitchen sounds, the knowing that the day had begun and would continue, with Daddy going to sleep and us kids going out to pick the vegetables and help Mama with the younger children. We’d draw lines in the dirt, setting out the rooms of our make-believe house around the old oak tree in the backyard. The roots were gnarled, big and sturdy, making sofas and chairs and nooks where we could nestle Josh, the baby, in his own little room.

  If I closed my eyes tight enough and gave in to the train, I could go back there and draw my own room around me, the walls invisible but respected by Callie and Jane, and even Daddy when he came out to see what we were doing. He always used the space where the door had been drawn, careful not to step on the furniture we’d outlined in the dirt. I squeezed my eyes to hold back the tears.