by Ninie Hammon
“I’m talkin’ ‘bout you going to the sheriff with that story about a little white girl getting strangled,” he says. And he slaps her full across the face, but holds onto her hair so she doesn’t fall, just snaps her head to the side. “You wanna tell me what that was about?” He slaps her again. Blood flies out of her nose and splatters on the plank flooring.
“Answer me!” he demands and draws his hand back to strike her again. She cringes away, and he lets go of her hair and she drops in a heap on the floor.
He straightens up and begins to unfasten the leather belt at his waist.
“I’d be locked up tight in a cell right now, thanks to you.” He pulls the belt free, raises it high above his head and brings it down hard across her shoulders. She screams, curls in a ball, with her hands over her head. He then hits her after every accusation.
“I’d be sitting there in the dark while a mob of white men with torches come down the street to the jail.”
Whap!
“They’d a’drug me out of that cell and hauled me off to that big oak tree out back of the courthouse!”
Whap!
“They’d a put a rope ‘round my neck and strung me up — right then and there. Ain’t no jury trial for a nigger kills a white girl.”
He hits her twice, whap, whap!
T.J. cringes from every blow, feeling each one not on his back where his mother feels them but on his soul.
His father is breathing hard, either from the effort or from the rage that so contorts his features T.J. can barely recognize him.
His father kicks his mother hard on the hip, then again in the side.
“The only reason I ain’t dead right now is ‘cause I had a alibi, the only alibi a black man could give that a white man’d believe. I was in jail when that little girl went missing! Got into a fight in a bar in Fairmont Friday night and they didn’t cut me loose until this morning.”
Pa reaches down and grabs T.J.’s mother by the upper arm and hauls her to her feet. She staggers, but he shakes her hard and yells, “Stand up!” and she remains upright.
He puts his face in hers, inches from her nose and demands in a voice filled with pent-up menace.
“Why’d you do that? Why’d you tell the sheriff you knowed some little white girl was gonna get killed? How could you know a thing like that when didn’t nobody know it except the ones found her body? The sheriff figured you knew ‘cause you seen me do it. And when he found out it couldn’t a’been me, he’d a’come out here and hauled you off to jail — if the little girl’s neighbors hadn’t seen that white man with a red beard comin’ out of the woods right after she went missing. He confessed — that’s the only reason you ain’t in jail right now about to get lynched your own self.”
He shoves her away from him, slams her against the wall, but she remains standing.
Then his voice gets soft, as full of venom as a water moccasin.
“Now you tell me straight, Eulalie. Tell me how you knew.”
“I seen it…” his mother says. The words are hard to understand spoken through her mangled mouth, her broken nose clogged with blood. “…Here.” She points to the chifforobe in the corner of the room. Her paints are stored there, the canvases shoved between it and the wall.
Mama staggers to the piece of furniture, pulls a canvas from behind it and turns it toward the light. It is the painting T.J. had seen on her easel in the shed when he found her writhing in the dirt, clawing at her throat as if she were being strangled.
Pa looks like he’s been kicked in the belly when he sees the painting. He tries to speak, but can’t seem to find the air to form words.
“Where’d you get that?” he finally gasps.
Mama says nothing, only looks down at her feet.
“I asked you a question, woman!” Pa roars. “Where’d you get that?”
“I … I painted it.”
“You painted it?” It is preposterous. Mama only does black-and-white sketches with just enough color to make them realistic — a red bow in a little girl’s hair or a little boy in a blue shirt — humorous drawings of little white kids where they look so adorable their mamas and daddies is willing to pay Mama good money for her work. There is no way she could possibly have created the portrait she holds in her hand.
T.J. wouldn’t have believed it either if he hadn’t seen her lying in the dirt in front of it, the paint still wet and a look of horror on her face.
Suddenly, Pa staggers backward, holding his finger out at her, shaking it, his voice quaking with an equal mixture of rage and fear.
“You’re a witch! Dear holy God in heaven, you’re a witch! Only way you coulda done that was … black magic!”
Then he thunders across the room and yanks the painting out of Mama’s hands, he slams it into the edge of the table, ripping the canvas and breaking the wooden struts. He hammers it on the table and the floor, again and again until there is nothing left but broken sticks and tattered pieces of canvas. He throws the last piece across the room and turns to face Mama.
T.J. believes he is going to kill her. He has never seen so murderous a look on anyone’s face as he sees now on his father’s. But he doesn’t move toward her, just looks at her in rage and hatred … and terror.
“You hear me good, woman. You listen up with all your whole self. Don’t you never, never paint nothing like this ever again. Do you hear me? If you do—” He crosses the room in two giant strides and grabs Mama around the throat. He lifts her with one hand on her neck and slams her into the wall, then holds her there, choking, her feet dangling above the floor.
“If you ever do black magic again … I will kill you. I will drag you out into the backyard, tie you to the clothesline pole, pour gasoline on you and strike a match … witches should be burned at the stake.”
T.J. shook his head, a physical gesture to clear out the mental images in his brain. He had spent his whole life avoiding memories of that time, had so walled off the horror it was almost like it didn’t exist, them things didn’t really happen. But the moment he got a good look at the three moles on Bailey Donahue’s neck, the memories come back to him in a flood, a storm-swollen creek, the water roaring downstream, washing away everything in its path.
Now, them memories was as crisp and real as rememberin’ the Egg McMuffin he’d had for breakfast this morning. And it ‘peared they was gonna stay right where they was, in the front of his mind, right alongside the new ones he was collecting that was just as bad.
Chapter Fourteen
Maybe it was the head wound. Yes, that was surely part of it. The fact that she had recently suffered a brain injury as traumatic as she had ought to be enough to explain all manner of strange phenomena.
But as she listened to the two earnest old men in her living room tell her a fantastic story that they obviously believed, she felt an otherworldliness, like she had stepped through the looking glass into Wonderland, or had stepped onto the train on Platform Nine and Three Quarters at King’s Cross Station and been whisked off to Hogwarts.
At some point during the telling of their tale, she had stopped being angry at them. How could she stay mad at two pathetic old men who had shared some kind of collective fantasy or delusion their whole lives?
They were to be pitied, not reviled. She felt sorry for them.
As the one called Dobbs talked, she caught T.J. studying her. Even as she grasped that the two men must suffer from some form of mental illness, she was also forced to admit how totally sane they seemed. More than sane. Astute. Their minds quick and sharp.
“That didn’t take long,” T.J. said, when Dobbs had paused in the telling of a story about a time when they were children that they’d debated whether or not they should warn the mill workers that there was going to be an accident there.
“What didn’t take long?” she asked.
“Didn’t take long for you to decide to tell yourself that we’re crazy.” He cocked his head to the side. “You have to tell yourself that ‘cause any
other explanation puts you in the same coop as the two looney roosters sitting here cluckin’ in your living room.”
She was too tired, too emotionally exhausted to play cat and mouse.
“Let’s say I have been careful to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so I can find my way back to the wardrobe.”
“What stories you been telling yourself about my mama’s painting of you? You decided I painted it? Maybe Dobbs here did? No, wait, I know. I found it in a yard sale and realized that it looked like you — though I hadn’t never met you — and decided to haul it over here to show you in the pouring rain because … oh, I don’t know … I was bored watching reruns of CSI?”
“I don’t have an explanation. But just because I don’t have an explanation doesn’t mean that your explanation is reality.”
She was done. This was getting nowhere and her head had begun thudding, the solemn bong, bong of a gong in some Himalayan temple.
“When did it happen?” T.J. asked.
“When did what happen?”
“When did you paint a picture with a window in it … that you don’t remember painting?”
Bailey’s heart began to pound, the gong in her head keeping rhythm with the beats.
“That, my dear, was a shot in the dark,” Dobbs observed.
“But if you’s plannin’ to begin life anew as a professional poker player, I’d advise you not to quit your day job.”
“What you don’t understand is that it doesn’t matter when you believe us,” the man named Dobbs said. His voice was deep and melodious. “You can do it today, or tomorrow or a week from Thursday. But you will eventually believe us. You don’t have any choice because you’ll prove it to yourself.”
“And what makes you think I plan to be alive next Thursday?”
“Let’s just say I don’t think you got a plan, an active plan not to be alive,” T.J. replied.
She merely looked at him.
“I don’t think you want to live, but I also don’t think you got no current, pressing need to be dead, neither. My read is that whatever it was drove you to pull the trigger on that revolver isn’t driving you quite so hard no more.”
Bailey got to her feet, not exactly knocking Sparky out onto the floor, but making him scramble.
“Game over. You said if I’d listen to you, hear you out, you would leave me alone, you’d go away and not come back. I’ve kept my end of the bargain. It’s time you kept yours.”
“Actually, the bargain was that you would listen to what we had to say … and paint me a picture.”
All the accumulated goodwill and pity the two men had banked as they told their story vanished in an instant. Bailey felt anger rise up with a taste of bile in the back of her throat. She was objective enough to see that her emotions had slipped their moorings, that ever since she and the ceiling tile had become homies, she had lost significant control over how she felt and what she said.
She could see it, but she didn’t care. No, more than that. She was glad.
“Fine! Done. You got it. You want a painting? I will give you a painting!” She fixed the two of them with a laser-focused stare. “And then you will leave and never come back!”
She turned on her heel and headed toward her studio.
“Come on.”
She flung open the studio door and marched across the room to the canvas … the one that contained the window … the one she…
No, not going there. The origin of the painting was not up for discussion. Just paint something on it. Anything. A pituitary gland. A gallbladder. Anything. Throw paint up on it, smear it around and bada boom, bada bing, the two old men would finally be out of her house, her life and her world — forever.
Extending out beneath the canvas was a tray affixed to the front of the easel. A pallet with gobs of paint on it lay on the tray beside a cup with half a dozen brushes. Bailey didn’t even pick up the pallet, just grabbed a brush out of the cup, shoved it into a blob of dark blue paint and touched it to the canvas.
The world is black, cold and dark all around. Bailey can’t breathe.
Water. She’s in black water. She can’t swim!
It’s so dark, she can see nothing. She’s drowning!
She has totally lost her sense of direction, doesn’t know which way is up or how to get “up.” It feels like she’s tumbling over and over but she doesn’t know how to stop, how to right herself.
Her head suddenly pops above the surface and images form in a blur before her — there’s water in her eyes, it stings and she’s squinting, can’t see. She fights the water, but doesn’t know how to keep from going back under again. Keeping your head above the water has something to do with kicking your feet, doesn’t it? It’s almost impossible to kick with shoes on, though. She tries, one shoe slips off, but the other weighs her down.
Voices. People shouting, crying out, screaming. Other people in the water. Someone’s hand brushes her cheek.
“Mommy!” she cries, or tries to, but when she opens her mouth it fills with foul-tasting water and she begins to strangle.
Bright sparkling lights. An explosion.
She reaches out, grasping at empty air, tries to grab something, anything.
Her fingers curl around a piece of wood, it’s attached to … it’s the arm of a chair, a heavy wooden Adirondack chair tumbling in the water. She holds on, tries to use it to pull herself up … but it’s slick and it slips out of her grasp and tumbles over on top of her, pushing her head back under the water again.
She can’t see, doesn’t know which way is up.
Mommy! Momeeeee! But there is no air to cry out.
Bursting the surface again, gasping for air, flashes of colorful light.
Back under. Darkness. Cold. She’s holding her breath, fighting the water, wanting to scream. She can hear nothing now, see and feel only water around with hunks of things, pieces of … things bump into her … she doesn’t know what. They whack her face, she grabs for them.
Up. Up. She has to get up, get air.
She’s desperate to expel the breath she’s holding. The pain in her lungs sears her chest, aching, throbbing, the pressure building and building—
She can’t hold her breath anymore.
It whooshes out of her in a rush of bubbles she ought to be able to see in front of her face but she can’t.
The pressure to hold her breath, keep it from bursting out of her was not nearly as fierce as the urgent, frantic need to breathe air back into lungs now empty.
It is more powerful than she is. She can’t control it, has to gasp, has to breathe back in.
No, it’s water, she can’t. Can’t. Ca—
Reflexively, she sucks in … not air. Water. Water rushes into her mouth and nose, burning.
It hurts. She can’t … there’s no…
Thoughts are gone.
She’s…
Nothing.
Raymond Dobson had heard descriptions of the phenomenon he was witnessing. Even though they had been whispered to him in urgent tones more years ago than he had fingers and toes to count, he could recall every detail.
But all T.J.’s accounts of what his mother had looked like when she painted had done nothing to prepare Dobbs for the reality of watching the process. It flat-out couldn’t be, the way the woman with the black hair was applying paint to the canvas, almost flinging the paint onto the surface. Nobody could do that, paint tiny, intricate details like that. Nobody could paint with both hands at the same time — two different parts of the picture!
Dobbs was ashamed to admit now that there had been times all those years ago when he hadn’t believed everything T.J. told him. He had never said as much to T.J., of course, would never have let on that he wondered sometimes if T.J. was either making it up or was in some way lost in his own fantasy. Now, he could see that not only had T.J. not exaggerated, his descriptions had fallen way short of reality. Hadn’t captured how foreign, otherworldly and impossible — how flat-out wrong this looked.
&
nbsp; Of course, Dobbs had often seen the finished paintings, sneaked terrified into the shed with T.J. to gawk at a still-wet horror. But seeing the process of creating them was an entirely different, more intense kind of horror. Watching the painting take on form and shape planted an elemental fear in his belly he hadn’t felt since the days when a trembling T.J. would meet him in the woods, saying nothing, so frightened and upset it took him awhile before he could get his voice under control to speak. Dobbs had always been patient and kind, knowing his friend had seen something that would put the fear of God in a grown man, and when it’d first started, T.J.’d been only eight years old.
They would sit together in silence, sometimes dangling their toes in the cool creek water, sometimes sitting on the log at the top of Big Bear Mountain, looking out over the fields and woods below. Sometimes just standing silent in the trees, staring at the shed behind T.J.’s shack where T.J. said his mother was inside painting a picture, with both hands flying over the canvas and her eyes squeezed tight shut.
T.J. stood beside Dobbs now, saying nothing, his eyes fixed in rabid attention on the young woman in loose jeans and a Betty Boop t-shirt, standing in front of a three-foot-square canvas, making an image in the window she’d been compelled to paint — when? Long enough ago that the paint appeared to be dry.
Dobbs had immediately noticed the lone painting already on the easel when they’d walked into her art studio, the childishly inaccurate, out-of-proportion table and bowl of fruit in front of the way-too-big-for-the-painting window in the background. The scene stole all the air from his lungs.
He supposed that until that moment some part of him had clung to an irrational hope that T.J. was wrong about Bailey. Just because this woman had sketched a window — Dobbs still thought it looked more like a Cracker Jack box than a window — with her left hand, didn’t mean she was destined to become the next Eulalie Hamilton. It didn’t mean that the mystery horror of their childhood, the terrible magic of fifty years ago, had returned.
