“I hate the devil,” Ethel said emphatically.
“I was only twelve, a good girl, you know what I mean,” Noon said, her voice still shaking.
“Know just what you mean,” Ethel said. “Even I was still unspoiled at twelve.”
“Now spoiled for life,” Noon said, crying again as she colored it all in for Ethel. Each detail, down to the acrid scent of turpentine as they smeared oil over her body, and the sound the calves made as they died.
“Motherfuckers,” Ethel said, stomping her feet so hard that she could feel the concrete through the thin soles of Noon’s slippers. “Low-down dirty devil-worshiping sons of bitches.”
“I thought once they stretched me open, that would be the worst part.” Noon stopped and stood and turned to face Ethel. Her eyes were shut tight, and she tilted her face the way a blind person does. “I thought I would just go numb. But I just kept fighting. Even after they were into their evil against me, I kept fighting. My whole body, my whole spirit just kept fighting. You ever seen a chicken after its head been cut off and it still runs around the barnyard? It’s already dead, but it keeps on running ’cause it thinks it’s still living. I kept on fighting them; even after I lost, I kept on fighting them.”
The gray that was streaming down on the two women had turned to blue, then orange, and now yellow. The yellow was bathing Noon’s face as she had her head tilted, eyes shut, facing Ethel. Ethel had known it must have been severe whatever it was that had kept Herbie a regular on her couch-bed on Kater Street. “You still fighting them, ain’t you?” Ethel asked as she took Noon’s arm so they could walk again.
“What you talking about?” Noon asked, stumbling in the high heels as they turned the corner of Lombard Street.
“The devil worshipers that got you, you still fighting them. I bet it ain’t never been right between you and your man. You still running around the barnyard without your head. At least if you just go on and lay down and die, you could get a little taste of some afterlife, but shit, ain’t you tired, you was twelve, ain’t you tired?”
Noon was crying again, and she put her free hand to her mouth, and then to her eyes, which were burning more then ever as the tears stirred up the dirt again. “I’m so tired,” she said, sniffing, and coughing, and sobbing. “I’m so tired of fighting everything. The people in the church, the people outta the church, the system, my husband, my daughter, my memories. I’m so tired of fighting my memories. And now my church is gone.” She was wailing, head going up and down, feet stomping. “I’m just plain tired of fighting.”
“Then stop, just stop!” Ethel shouted. “You been to church all your life, what they tell you to do with the devil?”
“We say, ‘Satan, get thee behind me.’” Noon mumbled it like a little girl.
“Well, that ain’t enough in your case. You need to tell him, ‘Satan, while you behind me, kiss my butt.’ Then you need to tilt your backside like you mean it and kick your leg, kick it like you kicking the shit out of the devil, like you would kick an old sewer rat that was trying to take a bite at your heels. Send him flying. He ain’t never had no more power over you than what you gave him. Now I know you can do that. I don’t care how refined you are. I know you can tell the devil to kiss your ass.”
They were right in front of Noon’s house. Ethel knew the house. She knew the steps. She knew that middle step where she had left her child. “What you say your house number was?” Ethel asked, not ready to give herself away, not yet.
“Red awnings, only red awnings on the block,” Noon said, sniffing hard. “I usually don’t like the color red, but my daughter Fannie talked me into them.”
“Your daughter got good judgment; we here, we at your house. Step up right here, then right there, one more,” Ethel said as she guided Noon up the steps. “Somebody here to let you in?”
“My husband, he’s here. I guess he don’t know what happened, the sun done come up and I ain’t in the kitchen stirring his breakfast in the pots.”
“Good luck with your eyes,” Ethel said. “I didn’t mean to yell at you, you been through a lot for one morning, but I just hate to see people stuck. Even if you moving backwards, it’s better than being stuck.”
Noon just nodded her head and stumbled in through her front door. And Ethel thought that she and Noon could have been friends if the past really didn’t matter.
She liked Noon, and she never had any real girlfriends to speak of. Plenty of men always ready to call themselves a friend of hers, but never the girls. She was the one that the nice girls were not allowed to play with because their mothers called her fresh. “Hot in the behind,” they said about her. Even after the town had forgiven her mother’s madness that morning and even allowed their little girls to play with Coreen, Ethel got a reputation as the fast one, the worldly one. She was never invited to the afternoon parties where the girls sipped punch from cups with handles and sucked on dainty pink and green party mints. She reasoned that she would have been a misfit anyhow. Her hair never grew long, so she couldn’t wear the pigtails with long satiny ribbons; her grandmother’s arthritic fingers could no way stitch the puffed-up party dresses with long sashes for tying bows, so she played with her sister, and the boys; she always played with the boys. And then after her sister was burned up in the car fire, and her grandmother that raised them died, there was never a woman she was close enough to call a friend. Except this morning, walking through the dusty mist as the sunrise showed off, propping up Noon, guiding her steps, telling her not to cry, falling right into her anger with her, sinking into the hurt with her: This was the closest Ethel came to feeling like a woman was her friend.
And then Ethel looked down, down at the steps. She knew she should leave before Herbie opened the door, but she couldn’t move just yet. The middle step held her. The step where she’d left her precious child.
THIRTY-TWO
If only it had been a boy. Ethel knew boys; she knew men. But she was scared to death of raising a baby girl to womanhood. As much as she loved that infant, what if the mothers kept their girls away from her the way she had been taboo to the nicer girls? Her baby needed lavenders, and pinks, and lime greens. All Ethel could give her was red.
She immediately thought of Herbie since he was the father of the child, and such a good guy at that. But she had to watch his bride up close for herself. It was, after all, the mothers who made the difference between what Ethel wanted for her baby and what she’d turn out to be.
So she spied on Noon. Noon had a round face, and large ears; generous, her grandmother used to say, large ears mean a person’s full of generosity. She had stability, routine: Her steps were always freshly scrubbed; she hung clothes on the line on Mondays and bought butterfish for frying on Fridays. She didn’t go to card games, or speakeasies, and Reverend Schell was her friend. But still, it was a wrenching kind of hard to leave her child.
She was up late the night before, knitting. She hadn’t knitted since her grandmother taught her when she was seven or eight. But when she unfurled the ball of soft pink yarn, it came back to her all at once. Knit two, purl two, count your stitches, Ethel. It came back to her, and she did it all in one night. She had to hurry, before the sun came up. She had to finish the soft pink blanket to cover her baby girl. She didn’t have time to close the stitches, but she knew Noon would pick up where she left off. Noon knew about pink things, like soft unfinished blankets. She lined the box with cotton diapers and wrapped the baby in the loosely knit blanket. She let the fringes hang over the top; she thought the box looked pretty that way. And still, it was the wrenching kind of hard to leave her. For sure, it hurt to leave Liz, but it was a tender, pulsing hurt, a gentle pain. It was all mixed in with memories of her sister. But with this one, her very own baby, the one she birthed by herself because she had no girlfriends to call on, right there in the wine cellar at Club Royale, just her and Willie Mann with the wine that eased the pain, leaving this baby hurt with a rawness, a whipping pain all through her body. Sh
e ran through the street. Four o’clock. She had to beat the sunrise. And she put the box right there on that middle step at Noon and Herbie’s house. She pressed the baby’s dark, dark hair to her breast. And she said, “I’m gonna lay you in this box, and I’m gonna leave you ’cause that’s how much I love you. And as soon as I put you down, I want you to cry your ass off, so they’ll come and take care of you. They good people in this house. That Noon gonna make you a good mother, and that Herbie, that’s your dad, he’s a good guy; he’s already your dad.” And the baby stared up at Ethel with eyes that were as dark as the pitch-black predawn morning set deep in skin the color of corn bread. Her eyes danced, and Ethel knew she understood.
THIRTY-THREE
Herbie was a wreck. First the bewilderment of the spilled jar of cream, puddle all on the kitchen floor, and Noon nowhere to be found. He had just finished dressing and was on his way out to look for her, to make sure she hadn’t snapped completely. Even though she’d seemed more relaxed in Florida than he’d seen her in some time, her mental state over the past months had been so fragile.
“Lord, just let her be all right.” Herbie said it out loud as he closed the closet door. “Ain’t like her to go walking the streets before the sun even comes up.” And then he said, “Thank God,” when he heard Noon’s voice out front. Until he got to the window, and his insides turned to jelly. It wasn’t just the sight of Noon, with her eyes clamped shut, struggling to get up the steps. Nor was it Ethel, curvy and soft-looking with a bright red jacket thrown casually over her shoulder. It wasn’t even that they both looked as if they had been rolling in the dirt. It was Noon’s hair. It was done up a way he had never seen it before, not even when she would let Liz take a comb to it.
She knows, he said. She must know. Liz must have told her about Ethel and me. Now they’ve been fighting. Except that he couldn’t figure the hair done up, the red high heels, the nightgown, why’d she still have on the nightgown. He snatched the door open and pulled Noon inside.
“I’m sorry, Noon, I’m so sorry,” he said as he fell to his knees and burrowed his head in her stomach. “As God is my witness, I’m sorry. I love you, Noon, I do.”
“Isn’t it the worse thing, just the worst thing!” She slipped out of the red heels, bent one knee, then the other, and knelt on the floor with Herbie. “Of all the things they could’ve done, who’d thought they would bulldoze my little church?”
“What! What did you say?” Herbie asked as he held Noon’s shoulders. “Look at me, Noon, what did you say?”
“I can’t look at you. I can’t see. Dirt’s all in my eyes; you got to clean them out for me, I can’t even open my eyes. It’s gonna hurt, some woman had to walk me home; she found me scratching in the dirt; I just went crazy when I saw what they did. I didn’t even get her name, Herbie, I can’t even thank her. My eyes, Herbie, my eyes are on fire.”
“Wait, don’t move, baby doll. Herbie’ll take care of those eyes.” He jumped up and ran upstairs to the bathroom and got cotton rags and washcloths and boric acid and filled a dish with water.
“Okay,” he said softly, settling back down on the floor with Noon, “let’s clean those eyes.” He worked with what seemed to Noon like amazing skill as he brushed the dirt from her lids, and then took her head in his lap and squeezed the water gently over her closed eyes, and then slowly raised her lids, to Noon’s grimaces, and squirms, and whispered complaints of how it burned and stung.
“Poor Noon,” he said when he was done. “You been through so much, Noon, and I ain’t been no real help to you, I been so impatient with you, I ain’t never really been much of nothing for you to lean on. And now they bulldozed your church. Damn.”
He stretched back across the floor and leaned his back against the couch and looked at the top of Noon’s head that was still resting in his lap. The hair, the way it was lightly fingered and puffed up just on one side was affecting him. He didn’t understand it and was surprised when he felt himself throbbing.
Noon opened her eyes slowly, they were tearing, but the stinging was gone, she could see the gray of Herbie’s pants; she put her hand there, right there where she saw his manhood rising. She had put her hand there, many times before; that was the best she’d been able to do was put her hand there. But she had never allowed herself the sensation of feeling it rise. And then it happened. Caught Noon by total surprise the way it happened, right there, without being on the altar, without Reverend Schell’s supplications for the Lord to touch and heal, right there on her living room floor. The line came up. That same line that welled up during her healing prayers. It welled up now. Then it broke. It swelled; then it burst. Engorged, then released. Twenty years’ worth of captive womanly passion gushed from the broken line. It percolated like oil when it’s first struck from deep in the earth. It covered her insides, set them on fire. “Thank you, Jesus,” she yelled as she moved all over Herbie, kissing him in places where she never had, then blanketed him; even though she’d never done it, she knew just what to do. “Praise the Lord, praise Him. Praise Him!” she shouted.
He was so unaccustomed to the feel of her body all over him.Herbie was completely still. He didn’t even breathe. He was so un-accustomed to the feel of her body all over him. It was warm and soft against him, just as he’d imagined it’d be. It felt to Herbie as if a cloud had just fallen from a lazy summer sky and just covered him right there on the floor. She was so soft all over him, until he found the center of the cloud that pulled him in, all the way in, and held him there.
“Damn,” he whispered into Noon’s ear when he could breathe again. “You serve a good God, Noon, a damn good God. Minh. Minh. Minh.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Ethel headed straight around the corner to Fannie and Liz’s. Noon’s slippers felt good on her feet. She could walk faster, with a bounce; even her bunions stopped hurting. Slippers were so sensible. That Noon is such a sensible woman, she thought. All of Ethel’s slippers had a high heel, a wedge, a lift that kept her from walking flush to the ground. Buying me a pair of flat slippers, she almost hummed to herself. Not red, pink. She paused when she got to the door. She curled her toes around in the slippers and thought that maybe she should come back later. It was still very early on a Saturday morning. Maybe Liz wasn’t even back from spending the week with her friend at Howard. The girls might even be keeping company. Liz may have stored up resentments over the years. But I’m already here, she thought, could use a cup of coffee after the morning I’ve had. I can tell Fannie what happened with Noon, how I comforted her, helped her home after she had been blinded by the dirt. But she would make Fannie promise that she would never tell Noon it was her. She trusted Fannie. She was uneasy about Liz, though.
She knocked hard on the door. No answer. Okay, she thought, this is South Philly. She looked under a large clay flower pot that adorned the window ledge. Sure enough, the key. She knocked again, then unlocked the door and went on in.
“Yoo-hoo,” she called. “Fannie, Liz, it’s Ethel, anybody home?” She walked into the living room and immediately thought, Liz. Everything was so perfectly coordinated. The navy and green and fuchsia. The lacy open weaves that almost touched the almond-colored floors, fresh blooms in the vase, latest books on the shelf, even down to the way the magazines were slanted on the coffee table to meet at the points. The room was just like the pictures of Liz, polished, finished, each hair in its place, a sterility, though, a sadness about it. She walked to the couch, tossed one of the navy and fuchsia pillows on its side. Then she called out again, “Is anybody home?”
Ethel headed for the stairway. “Wake up, sleepyheads,” she called as she pressed her slippered feet against the hardwood steps. “Liz, it’s your aunt Ethel, baby, wake up, wake up, remember that wake-up song your aunt Ethel used to sing to you. Do you remember me, Liz?” She was talking faster and louder, feeling nervous as she reached the top of the stairs. The creaking now came from the banister as she leaned on it to step up the last step, onto the hallway floo
r. Excited, she told herself, supposed to be excited, haven’t seen my Liz in fifteen years. And then she laughed at herself when she realized she was scared too. Chile just might possibly hate me, she thought, yeah, Ethel, you scared, that would hurt and you know it and you scared, but you in here now. You right here in Liz and Fannie’s house.
Ethel was almost to Liz’s room. The door was open wide. She could see the draperies pulled back, showing white sheers over open venetian blinds. The sun rushed through the window, impatiently, and was divided by the blinds into organized rows of dust-filled beams. Ethel knew this had to be Liz’s room. The navy and fuchsia and green of the draperies matched the living room so.
She paused at the wide open door and coughed. Dust everywhere, she thought. Outside, inside, I can’t escape the dust today. She reached in and knocked. “Liz, baby, it’s Aunt Ethel, are you in here?” The quiet was unsettling, the quiet and the dusty sunbeams. She flexed her foot in the slippers and breathed deep and walked into Liz’s room.
She didn’t immediately look down at the floor, at the center of the room where Liz sat, head hung, cradling Fannie’s wounded head in her lap, where they’d been from four in the morning until now, about seven. She wasn’t even aware of them at first. She was too taken by the wall. The entire side of the room gone. It didn’t have the look of a carpenter’s work, systematic. It was just banged out, a desperation to it.
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. Her horrified eyes traced the jagged outline where the emptiness met virgin wall, right near the top. Chalky white plaster showed under the pink and green wallpaper from the top down along the seam of the wall in a crooked line that peaked and dived. Ethel’s eyes followed the line down around the floor where crumbs of plaster glistened, past the bed with its sheet pulled away, past the hammer. And then she saw Fannie and Liz, sitting where they had been sitting for the past three hours.
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