The owner of the diner came out from the kitchen and demanded they leave at once. He said he’d called the police. Most of the customers had left when the fight started, but a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk outside the diner’s plate glass window. The men knocked each other down and got back up. Dishes lay broken on the tile floor. Soda mixed with blood in the grout lines.
Junior’s fist ached. He’d never known he could throw such a hard punch, much less throw one again and again. His knuckles cracked against teeth and cartilage and bone. He absorbed blow after blow. It wasn’t until one of the men pulled a Barlow knife from his pocket that Junior felt at a disadvantage. The knife sliced across Junior’s forearm. Warm blood trickled from the cut. The cold blade was such a contrast to the hot skin-on-skin fighting that he knew they were beat. He tried to warn Chester, but the man with the knife was quick.
Junior lost track of Fern during the fight. He didn’t think of her standing and watching the mess unfold. He didn’t think of her at all until he saw her step between Chester and the man with the knife. He didn’t know if Fern meant to save Chester or if she’d only stepped into danger in a moment of confusion. The knife blade arced up on a trajectory for Chester’s gut, but it sank into Fern’s gut instead, into the space where she carried Melvin’s child. She screamed—not a scream of pain or fear, but a primal scream of rage.
The fighting stopped. Fern collapsed on the cold tile floor. Her face went pale. Junior knelt beside her. The men who’d come into the diner in such a frenzy slipped away. Only Junior and Chester and Fern remained. Even the owner of the diner disappeared. Fern lay on her back. Her breathing grew ragged.
“Get your mother,” Junior said. Chester ran.
“Help is coming,” Junior said.
“The baby,” Fern said. “The baby’s coming.”
Junior told her to hang on and keep breathing. He pushed her dress up over the hump of her heaving belly. The gash from the knife was deep and jagged. Bits of cloth from the cotton dress clung to the wound. It looked bad, but Junior thought she’d survive it. He tore a section from her dress and used it to stanch the bleeding. Beneath his hand, he felt the warm pulse of her heartbeat low and deep in her belly. Her blood ran thick and sticky. Junior’s nose filled with the coppery scent of blood and fear, but there was something else, something salty and fishy. His sister smelled of the Gulf of Mexico, of tropical sunshine and swamp heat, of fresh mullet and stone crab, of sugarcane and cypress bark, of their mother.
Junior felt dizzy. The wound on his arm was superficial, but he’d lost some blood in the fight. It left him lightheaded and confused. Fern breathed in short bursts between clenched teeth. Her eyes squeezed shut. She held his hand, grasped it so hard he lost all feeling in his fingers. She reared up and bore down. Sweat rolled slick across her face and neck. She collapsed and panted, lolling her head from side to side on the filthy floor. Nothing had prepared him for this. He prayed, something he hadn’t done in a long time. God or someone answered, because Clementine appeared beside him. She put her hand across his hand, the one holding the cloth to the wound on Fern’s belly.
“Let me see,” she said. He fell back. Clementine peeled away the scrap of blood-soaked fabric and examined the cut.
“The baby’s coming.” Fern reared up again and cried out. The wound on her belly ripped a bit wider and fresh blood poured from the cut.
“She needs to relax,” Junior said. “She’s making it worse.”
“She’s laboring,” Clementine said.
Ora appeared. She hoisted a heavy bag on one of the tables, searched through it, and pulled out an amber vial. Fern’s mouth opened and closed as Ora squeezed a few drops of dark liquid on her tongue. Whatever it was, it smelled bitter and potent. Clementine and Ora consulted with one another about the wound and the imminent birth and the best thing for pain. They spread a clean cloth beneath Fern’s legs, produced a pillow for her head. Junior relaxed. The women were in charge now. He looked around for Chester but saw only the eyes of strangers gawking through the glass window of the diner. Junior recognized some of the faces staring in, particularly the women. The women stood in a solid line across the doorway of the diner. They wouldn’t let anyone enter while Clementine and Ora worked. These women had come to Clementine and Ora for their own births or to prevent a birth. They came for painkillers and sleeping remedies. Junior felt safer, seeing the women gathered. They would not allow Fern to be harmed.
“Here she comes.” Ora crouched between Fern’s thighs and peered into the space between her legs. Junior looked away. Fern grunted and howled. Clementine held a hand behind her back and helped her push. Junior heard a slick popping sound, then silence, then a long wail. He thought the wail came from Fern, but it was the baby. Ora held the tiny child in one hand and examined it. Junior thought there must be something wrong with the baby. It was so tiny and covered with shiny blobs of pink and gray slime, but Ora smiled and placed the slick bundle on Fern’s chest.
“A girl,” she said. “Just like you thought.”
Fern lifted her head to examine the baby. She ran her fingers across its wriggling body. Junior crawled forward. He wanted to see this. It seemed a kind of miracle, though he knew women gave birth every day. The baby was darker than Fern. Her head was covered with a mass of fine black curls and when she opened her mouth to howl, hungry for milk or angry at being pulled into the cold world, Junior saw a glint of white against her gray gums.
“She’s got teeth.” Fern laughed. “That’s a good sign. She’ll be tough.”
Junior reached out a finger and touched the baby’s dimpled shoulder. “She’s too small,” he said.
Ora snipped through the veiny gray umbilical cord and gathered the blood and placenta into a jar. Junior knew she would boil them into a strong tea to restore strength to Fern’s blood.
“She’s perfect.” Clementine dressed Fern’s wound with fresh cloths and a smear of iodine. “I’ll sew you up tight,” she told Fern. “Don’t you worry.”
“I’m not worried,” Fern said. She stroked the newborn’s delicate shell-like ear and moved the baby to her breast. The child opened and closed her mouth a few times before latching on and sucking. “Oh, she’s strong!” Fern sounded delighted despite her bleeding belly and the trauma of giving birth in a strange place. Junior thought she’d make a natural mother. She was right to keep the baby.
The rush of adrenaline from the earlier fight and from the fear surrounding Fern’s labor left him feeling almost peaceful, but there would be no peace. The crowd outside the window grew loud. He couldn’t understand what they said, but he knew they were angry.
Ora draped a small cloth over the baby at Fern’s breast. “I was afraid of this,” she said.
Clementine took the child from Fern and helped her to stand, but she doubled over, collapsing to all fours. “Can you carry her?” Clementine asked Junior.
He scooped his sister into his arms, careful to avoid scraping the open cut on her belly. Even so, she moaned with pain.
Outside, the curious crowd grew larger. Some of the faces at the window were twisted and angry. The women at the door wouldn’t hold the crowd much longer. Ora led them through the kitchen and out to the alley, where she’d asked Chester to wait for them in the car. Junior tucked Fern into the back seat and slid in beside her. Ora sat on the other side with the baby. Clementine climbed in front with Chester. Fern reached for the baby, who was crying again.
“Take the back roads,” Clementine said.
ELEVEN
WILLET DROVE US EAST across Mississippi. We left behind the flat dull roads of the Delta. The Big Black River flowed along south of us, though it often looked like nothing more than a muddy stream. Dense forests lay to our north, interrupted by an occasional stretch of farmland. Hills sprang up from the earth and I could no longer see every blade of grass between Willet’s truck and the horizon. The trees grew greener and thicker as we drove.
We crossed into Alabama before lunchtime on t
hat first day. I’d never been outside the state of Mississippi before and I had expected it to feel momentous, but the presence of a state line didn’t change the geography in any meaningful way. The roadside gas stations were the same. The people, when we stopped to buy a bag of boiled peanuts, were no different from the people in Mississippi. In Tuscaloosa, we stopped at a squat cinder block restaurant for barbecue sandwiches on white bread. I was still licking the sticky sauce from my fingers when Willet pointed the truck south.
We spent most of that first day driving across Alabama. Willet pointed to an enormous shopping mall off the highway. “I helped build that one,” he said. “It ain’t been open a year.” I wondered how anyone could shop in such a place without getting lost. The parking lot looked bigger than the entire town of White Forest.
“More than a hundred stores in one building,” Willet said. “You couldn’t pay me to shop there.”
We crossed into Florida at nightfall and Willet got us a cheap motel room in Tallahassee. A 24-hour pancake house sat across the highway from the motel. We stuffed ourselves with hash browns and maple sausage before going to bed and we had more of the same before driving away the next morning. Willet’s plan was to get to Tampa by lunchtime. We took the Suncoast Parkway. Traffic slowed us down for the first hour, but soon the road cleared and we were able to keep up a decent pace. The towns we passed through had pretty names: Gulf Hammock, Crystal River, Homosassa Springs. Many of the homes that stood along the highway were painted bright colors—white with aqua blue or coral trim. We passed mobile home parks where residents sat on plastic chairs under plastic awnings and watched the traffic pass. Every now and again, I caught a glimpse of water through the neighborhoods or through the trees. “Is that the ocean?”
“That’s the Gulf of Mexico,” Willet said.
Florida felt different than Alabama or Mississippi. The sun seemed brighter somehow. The air smelled like pickle brine and fresh fish. We’d eaten a good-size breakfast, but the smell of fish made me hungry. I tried to talk Willet into stopping ahead of schedule, but he said we weren’t stopping until we’d crossed Tampa Bay.
“What’s the hurry? We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”
“We’re looking for answers,” Willet said. “I’m tired of not knowing anything.”
The closer we got to our destination, the more Willet talked about our father. He dredged up memories from before I was old enough to remember anything. He talked about the time Daddy brought home a five-foot-long catfish, and the time he shot a rattlesnake from forty yards away. I liked hearing my brother’s stories in the same way I liked hearing stories from Granny Clem. It was strange to realize that Willet’s memories were not parallel to my own. He told me things I’d never heard before, like the story about the bees.
Willet was six years old when Daddy and Uncle Chester got the idea to rob a bee tree for honey. He begged Daddy to let him come along. Robbing a bee tree sounded like a big adventure, but Daddy was a sonofabitch. He said no. He said Willet was too young. Willet begged, and Daddy finally agreed as long as he promised to stay in the car with the windows rolled up tight. It pissed Chester off to no end. Chester never did like kids. He didn’t make any excuses for it either.
Willet said the bee tree was the coolest damn thing he ever saw. They pulled right up next to it, which was not the smartest move. Daddy and Uncle Chester wore gloves and long-sleeved shirts and had their pants tucked down into their socks. They tied bandannas across their noses and mouths. When the door to the car swung open, the tree was singing. It was more beautiful than a church choir. Willet sat in the closed-up car, sweating like a fat hog and wishing he could get out and touch the singing tree. Daddy went to work with a hacksaw. The bees swarmed out of the hollow trunk in an angry stream. Chester went in with his hands and a long knife to slice out the honeycomb.
Willet felt sorry for the bees. Daddy and Uncle Chester were stealing and it was wrong, as wrong as stealing from a store or somebody’s house. The honey belonged to the bees. The tree belonged to the bees. What right did anyone have to barge in and take their life’s work?
Willet opened the car door and yelled for them to stop. Daddy damn near fell off the ladder. He hollered, but Willet couldn’t understand him with the bandanna tied over his mouth. The first bee stung Willet right on his cheek. He said it wasn’t too painful, just a pinprick. Then the next bee stung and the next and it became a scalding hot sort of pain. He took off running. Pretty soon, he’d lost all sight of Daddy and Uncle Chester and the car. His face and arms swelled up something awful. He could barely see out of one eye. He fell out on a patch of grass next to a field of young cotton. He lay there hoping Daddy and Uncle Chester had robbed those bees of everything they held dear, because he couldn’t see how such mean creatures deserved to have even one minute of happiness. Then he passed out.
I asked Willet what he was trying to tell me.
“Just listen,” he said.
Once they got Willet home, Mama wailed and cried and fussed over him. He spent the next week taking pills that made him sleepy and gave him wicked nightmares. It was one of the most traumatic moments of his childhood, he said. Yet, about a year later when he refused to go out on the front porch until somebody did something about the goddamned swarming wasps, Mama said she didn’t understand why he’d become fearful of a little sting all of a sudden.
Our father, he said, was like those bees: beautiful until you got too close and then mean as hell. And Mama was never interested in the truth. She iced over the bad parts of our father like she iced over a caramel cake. She couldn’t stand to look at anything ugly or painful. How else could she forget about Willet’s bee stings, about his suffering? How else could she pretend Daddy didn’t have a thing to do with Pansy going missing?
I didn’t know the answers and Willet wasn’t looking for any. He was telling me he’d figured things out, but I wasn’t so sure. I wanted to believe in Daddy’s goodness. I knew he wasn’t honest. I knew he was a criminal, but I wanted to think he’d had good reason to live the way he did. Maybe I was like Mama. Maybe I was too eager to ice over the truth and make something sweet from the bitterness.
We ate a lunch of greasy fried fish po’ boys just outside of Tampa. Willet found the Tamiami Trail on the map and we continued south, following the signs to Fort Myers and then to Naples. Once we left the kitschy sun-soaked opulence of Naples, the scenery changed. There were fewer houses by the side of the road and the scent of the water grew stronger. We drove for miles surrounded by thick trees sprouting from algae-covered swamps. We were a long way from home and nothing looked familiar. At dusk, fog rolled in thick and heavy. Willet squinted over the steering wheel of the pickup truck. He drove slowly, adjusting his headlights from bright to dim and cussing when it made no difference. He’d have pulled over if we weren’t already on a desolate stretch with no motels or gas stations for miles. Something brackish and rotten stank up the air and the fog made everything soft and surreal, like the first moments of a nightmare. We’d been listening to a music station on the radio, but there was more static than music by then. I fiddled with the knob, trying to dial in something new, but nothing penetrated that lonely stretch of road. We didn’t pass any other cars and I wondered if the traffic was always light or if the fog kept people home. Willet said he didn’t know. It was easy to imagine we were the only people in the world, that everyone else had been snatched up by God in an apocalyptic homecoming, our invitations lost in the mail. I pulled the quarry rock from my pocket and held it in my fist—a talisman against strange forces, a small piece of home.
We floated around a curve in the road, a curve Willet must have sensed rather than seen, and something leapt out of the mist into the beam of our headlights. Willet slammed the brakes. I slid forward, slamming my chest against the dashboard.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Willet yelled.
A wild tawny creature turned its head and glared at us with golden, glowing eyes. The panther disappeared so qui
ckly, I wondered if I’d imagined it.
Willet drove deeper into the fog. I pressed the quarry rock to my heart. It felt like it would beat right out of my bruised chest. What else would leap from the shadows to confront us? And how could we be prepared?
We checked into the Glades Motel late that night. Willet asked for room seventeen, the room where they’d found Daddy. The woman behind the counter pushed the registry toward us. Willet signed.
“No dogs. No loud music. No drugs,” she said. “Clean your fish outside, not in the sink. If you clog up the sink with scales, you’ll pay for the plumber.” Her voice was raspy and deep. By the smell, I figured she smoked a few packs a day. It made me think of Mama.
Willet showed the woman a picture of our father. It wasn’t a recent photo. We didn’t have recent photos. It was a faded Polaroid of Daddy holding up a large catfish and grinning. “Do you remember this man?” Willet asked. “He stayed here back in June for a few weeks.”
The woman said, “Nice fish.”
Willet pressed her.
The woman shoved a key across the desk. “I’ve already forgotten what you look like.”
Willet said, “He’s the man who died here. Surely you ain’t forgot that.”
“All men die,” she said. “It don’t jog my memory none.”
The motel room was small and dingy and dim: a double bed with paper-thin sheets and a scratchy brown bedspread, a bathroom so small you couldn’t open or close the door if you were sitting on the toilet, and, in one corner, a knee-high refrigerator, an aluminum percolator, and a hot plate, all generously billed as a kitchenette. Willet rolled a cot from a small closet and tossed a thin blanket on top. “You can have the bed,” he told me.
The Past Is Never Page 17
