by Amy Sorrells
“Nothin’. He never let me come near his house—the trailer where he lived.” It didn’t feel right to tell him about the cigarette burns. Or the beatings. Or the fact that the Devines made Jed turn over all his hard-earned money to them.
“Miss Anniston.” He got up real close, too close, probably to make sure I was aware of the seriousness of his questioning. “We have reason to believe Hettie and John … well … that the Devines shoulda never been allowed to provide a home for a foster child. That they’ve been dishonest with the law.”
“What’s this have to do with Jed? You’re still looking for him, aren’t you? Well, aren’t you?”
He looked over at Mama, as if he needed permission to tell me the truth. I felt like I might be sick and covered my mouth.
“We have reason to believe—”
I couldn’t listen. I stood, ready to run outta there as fast as I could into the orchards, down to the creek—
“Anni, sit down, child.” Ernestine, who’d been sitting next to me, tugged at my hand.
“We have reason to believe your friend Jed is a runaway. And as he’s a ward of the state, we have the responsibility to find him.”
“A runaway? Jed? He wouldn’t run away without telling me.” But as soon as I said the words, I knew this was one of the ladders Ernestine said would come. Relief fell over me like rain over parched summer orchards, and I knew.
Jed was alive.
As sure as I was sitting there breathing, Jed was surely alive.
Sonje lapli ki leve mayi.
“Remember the rain that made your corn grow.”
CHAPTER 48
Comfort
Alive.
I lie in my bed, exhausted by a day in the orchards, and for the first time I can remember, I feel alive. Blood pulses warm through my withered veins. My heart thumps, feral, against the center of my chest. The skin of my arms, my legs, tingle from a day spent soaking up currents of air, of indigo sky. Joy immerses me, unsettles me, like a body hurtling off a barren cliff, slicing through water, then floating in the depths, suspended, whole.
I admit I wait like Cinderella for another midnight to arrive—and still I do not feel I have escaped its doomed chime—but for now, I feel what God intended unfurling within me. Released from darkness at last, I taste the essence of hope pushing, shy but intent on release.
Is this how God heals? Slow enough to feel the slough of pain, but quick enough to press me deeper into Him? Is this how God binds up wounds, salving them with the trembling assurance of a lover, binding them with the gauze of peace?
Freedom proclaims its truth. My bones near rattle with the rhythm of its ringing.
I am awash in ashes transformed into a tiara of astonishment. I am draped in an array of applause directed at me from the One who not only made me, but who is making me still.
I pull the old, worn burlap pecan bags off every mirror in my house, permitting myself to see reflections of places long devastated and letting my heart roam ancient ruins. Not without fear, but with possibility. Not without shame, but with the advent of a double portion of joy.
Even as the pecans drop all around the trees, I am sure there will be a spring—as sure as I am that the branches will once again display the splendor of their journey through rock-laden soil and torrents of storms because of the beckoning sun. Because of the rains that soak them. Because of the hands that turn the soil.
The phone rings as the sun grazes the tree-laden hills with a final caress, and I answer, sure it is Solly. But there is silence on the other end. “Hello? Who’s there?”
A sob, more like a choke, is muffled, but even that much is familiar.
“Mama?”
“I’m so sorry.” Her words come slurred, but they come, just the same, before the connection breaks.
In the morning, I open the front door and find a rose, red and wilted, on the step.
The stem is broken, but care has been taken to see that the thorns are trimmed off.
I hold it to my cheek and weep.
Yon manman pa janm mòde pitit li nan zo a.
“A mother never bites her child to the bone.”
CHAPTER 49
Anniston
More ladders fell from heaven after that. The first couple came when October stretched into November, and I’d grown tired of waiting for a word from Jed. The pain of him running away without saying good-bye and not being 100 percent certain he was alive mixed together in my heart. I couldn’t figure out whether to hope or to grieve. Loneliness and relief fought for a place in my head, which didn’t have room for the both of them. At school, words blurred across my textbook pages. I tried to focus on all the work there was to do in preparing hundreds of holiday pecan orders, but the annual routine provided little comfort. Sally Roberts and her friends invited me to sit at their table at lunch again, but I knew they only felt sorry for me. So I refused, choosing instead to keep company with an empty seat at the table where Jed and I had sat all last spring.
The only break in the days came from working at the Curly Q on Saturdays. On one particular afternoon, I waited for Comfort to finish up with Lila Roberts, Sally’s mother.
Lila left no doubt in my mind that snooty was a genetic trait. “Oh, it feels so scrumptious to have my nails done. Three days overdue does nothing but make me panic. Think of how folks have seen my falling-apart nails every time I go to pay for something at the cash registers, taking money out of my wallet with cracked and chipped-up nails.”
“You can’t tell, Lila. They always look fabulous when you come in. Like you just had ’em done.”
“Comfort, you are too kind.”
“’Scuse me, Mrs. Roberts. Comfort, may I run to the library for a bit? I’m almost done with Song of the Lark and want to see if there’s something else I can take home to read.”
“Sure. Go on over, and I’ll meet you there after I finish here.”
I took my time moseying down Main Street. Mrs. Bixley’s Shell Seeker gift-store window held mirrors framed with sand dollars and even one of Comfort’s brand-new shell mosaic end tables. An electric train weaved its way through mountain passes and tunnels in the window of the toy store. I stopped to tap the glass at the puppies in the pet-store window, and as I did, I saw Mr. Morgan, the owner, hand a cage holding a bright yellow canary to a girl and her mother.
I burst through the door, jolting all the puppies and kittens in the front window out of their slumber. “Where’d you get that canary, sir?”
Mr. Morgan, a mostly bald, gray-headed man, adjusted his bright red suspenders, which matched his bow tie. “Oh, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any more, young lady.”
“I don’t want to buy one. I just wondered how you came upon him.”
He massaged his chin and considered me for a moment. “Funny you should ask. I don’t carry birds too often. Not much of a demand for them. But a boy a little older than yourself brought him to me a few weeks ago. Said he’d found him in the wild. Nursed him back to health. Wondered if I could find him a good, safe home.”
“Thanks, Mr. Morgan. That’s what I thought.” Before he could ask me anything more, I skipped out of the store. I don’t think I stopped grinning until I reached the library, where a blast of air-conditioning greeted me when I walked into the one-hundred-year-old building. A librarian stacked new arrivals on a rolling cart, and I picked up one called Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron. The unbent spine creaked open, and I sank my nose into the paper, which smelled like tree pulp and ink still drying on the pages, then set it down next to another new arrival called The Thorn Birds.
I made my way to the back corner of the first floor, where the scent of people’s fingers and homes blended together and soaked in the paper, which made the library smell a little like the Goodwill over in Foley. I thumbed through the young adult books like Are You There God? It’s Me, Marga
ret; Confessions of a Teenage Baboon; and Flowers in the Attic, which Mama said was not appropriate for me yet. Girls like Sally carried around a new one from this section every week, and I tried to find one that looked interesting there. But I always ended up in the literature section.
This time, though, I headed to the paleontology, rocks, and minerals section of the library. I knew from Jed and a little help from the card catalog that most were in the 500s section. Sure enough, I found Exploring and Understanding Rocks and Minerals, by Robinson; Rocks, Minerals, and Crystals, by Almond and Whitten; An Introduction to the Practical Study of Crystals, Minerals, and Rocks, by Cox; and A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals, by Frederick H. Pough.
Close by, I found The Bone Hunters, by Lanham; Late Canadian Cephalopod Faunas from Southwestern United States, by Flower, Hayner, and Hook; Let’s Go Fossil Shark Tooth Hunting, by Cartmell; and Collecting Fossils, by Major.
Stuck in the middle were four books that were definitely out of place: Experimental Oyster Transplanting in Louisiana, by Tarver and Dugas; The Oyster Thief, by Devine; A Survey of the Oyster and Oyster Shell Resources of Alabama, by May; Experiments to Re-establish Historical Oyster Seed Grounds and to Control the Southern Oyster Drill, by Pollard. Strange, but not if Jed spent lots of time there. I doubt the librarians sorted these books much.
I tilted my head sideways, reading more titles, when I noticed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, squashed far back between The Weekend Fossil Hunter, by LaPlante, and Microspores from the Fredericksburg Group of the Southern United States, by Srivastava. Last year, Mrs. Nowlan mentioned Ms. Angelou’s book in English class as a very important work of literature we’d study later in high school. Literature was definitely a lot of rows away from rocks and fossils.
As I picked up the book, an envelope fell out.
Anni
My hands jittered as I opened the seal.
From between the folds of paper, red rose petals fell, hitting the floor without a sound.
Dear Anni,
If you find this letter, the first thing I need to say is I’m sorry. Again. Sorry for leaving the way I did. Sorry for making you think I was dead. But it was the only way I could think of to escape.
You’ve always been the brave one, the one who faces things head-on. I guess that makes me a coward, ’cause I couldn’t face another day caught in the cage of other folks making my life into what they wanted. I had to go when I had the chance. I had to do this, to make a life for myself so that someday, Lord willing, I can make a life with someone like you. Maybe, someday, with you.
I thought maybe you’d find your way to this section of the library. That maybe, when things settled down, you’d wonder about me enough to wonder about fossils and minerals and the stuff of the earth human hands can’t hurt. That maybe, you’d find this out-of-place book like you found out-of-place me last spring and find the treasure inside.
If you’re reading this, you found me. I’m free like the canary we found last spring. I won’t say where I went, in case someone besides you finds this, but you’ll know when I tell you I saved up the money I needed to for things longed for, and I’m not far beyond the distant hill.
Yours,
Jed
“You ready to go home, little bookworm?” I nearly jumped a mile when Comfort rounded the corner into the aisle where I sat, dried red rose petals scattered all around me.
All I could do was hold the letter out to her, along with a string of leather holding a single bead of hematite rose.
As Comfort read the letter, tears spilled out of her eyes too.
“Is this what Ernestine means about God bringing us ladders like He brought one to Jacob, out in the middle of the desert?”
“It is, Anni. It surely is.”
The next ladder fell that same night. Didn’t start out that way, though. After supper, the bedroom grew dark as I reread Comfort’s notes and poems, and I tucked the letter from Jed into the shoe box along with them under my bed. When I rolled over, Princella stood in my doorway, the light shining behind her in a way that reminded me of the line of framed silhouettes in the front hall.
“Mama never took care of me.” Whiskey sloshed out of her glass as she took a step toward the bed where I lay. “Took to her bed in a dark room every evening, dark like this room now.” She closed her eyes and turned in a circle, as if held by some invisible dance partner.
Was she telling me about her growing up? Why now?
“After St. Augustine’s—” She took a gulp of her drink, then wiped a drip off the side of the sweaty glass. “Cole was the first good thing came out of my life up ’til then. The only good thing.”
“I don’t—I don’t understand.”
“Hush.” The word slid out of her mouth, and she stumbled, reaching toward me to put a finger over my lips. “Let me finish. My daddy—he raped me. My brother raped me. Mama’s boyfriends raped me. Like someone painted a bull’s-eye right here.”
She cackled those last two words in my face, and I nearly vomited as the acrid smell of whiskey tumbled out with the rot of grief in her story. She drew an imaginary circle on her forehead like she was tracing a bull’s-eye. Reminded me of the circles of grass cuttings around the base of all the pecan trees.
“Guess green eyes aren’t the only thing I passed down to Comfort, now are they?”
I searched my heart for something to tell her she’d done right, fighting back the feeling of having to be sick at the thought of her raped over and over and over again, as a child, a baby, as a girl like me who shoulda had no other worries than running wild and free down red, red roads and into the arms of a daddy like mine. “But … you had Daddy.”
“I did have your daddy. Messed that up too.”
I pushed myself up tight against the head of Comfort’s canopy bed, grabbed a pillow, and clutched it hard against my chest. My heart thumped like a wild rabbit thrashing around inside. I studied my fingernails, afraid to look at her. Afraid to hear what she might say next. And what she said next was the last thing I ever thought I’d hear from her.
“I’m trying to tell you I’m sorry. Sorry for what I done and what I have not done. Sorry for what I am and sorry for what I ain’t. Sorry I chose to hate instead of forgive, when forgive is all folks around me ever did for me.” The rest of the whiskey disappeared down her throat as she threw the glass back. “All those things that was done to me, I wanted someone to pay for all that. Someone shoulda paid. Don’t you think? Can you understand that?”
Her spittle sprayed into my eyes as her tongue, thick from the drink, struggled to get the words out. I tried to wipe it away with the corner of the bedsheet without her noticing.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You do? You understand?” She turned her face up toward the ceiling, arms outstretched, toward God, I supposed. “You hear that? My granddaughter says she understands. She understands I never intended those someones to be my own sons. Never intended my own daughter … what it cost my beautiful daughter … cost her the same as all it cost me.” She slowly turned, then wobbled out of the room, pausing to grab hold of the doorframe for one last moment. “I’m going to do better. Starting tomorrow. I promise.”
That might not have sounded like a ladder, but the angels, they brought down hope and took away pain, floating down on their silvery wings even as I fought to fall into a fitful sleep. Faceless shadows of Princella’s family I’d never met haunted me, running after me. Then sirens came, like the same ones that screamed Daddy’s departure from the earth—sirens I soon realized were not a dream, but real. Too real. Again.
Every light in the house was on when I stumbled down the stairs. By the time I got to the den, the medics had already pulled the white sheet over Princella’s head, her body stretched out straight and flat on the gurney.
“Mama!”
“Oh, Anni, come here, baby girl.”
Mama held me in her arms, covered, like the night Daddy died, in her thick pink bathrobe. Her hair smelled like freesia shampoo, and everything felt the same except no puddles of blood spread all over the floor.
“What happened?”
“It was the drink. She had too much. Her heart plain stopped beatin’. Broken as it was, I’m s’prised she lasted this long.” Ernestine dusted off a framed picture lying facedown on the floor. “She was holdin’ this picture of Cole to her chest when Mr. Vaughn found her. She was already gone.”
Wòch nan dlo pa konn doulè wòch nan soley.
“The stone in the water does not know the pain of the stone in the sun.”
CHAPTER 50
Comfort
Mama. Her name is a statement. A fact. A truth.
She is my mama. She was my mama. Now she lies still, unable to argue. Unable to chastise. Unable to correct.
I think of the broken rose.
I consider her broken road.
Her skin is pale, but not the gray or white I expect as I pull the sheet down to take one last look at her. More the color of the champagne. Or porcelain. Or of grace—the secret abandon of one who has finally found peace.
I press my lips against her cold cheek, rosy only from the tear-smeared rouge.
“I forgive you.”
And I do.
“Fly away, Mama. Fly away free.”
And somehow, I know she does.
SUMMER 1981
Bondye Bon.
“God is good.”
