The Butcher's Daughter

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  “It’s all right. And thank you for asking.”

  It speaks volumes about Cyril’s character, given what he’s been through and what she’s told him about Travis.

  What does it say about your own that you’re still married to him?

  But how do you divorce your husband when he’s under siege overseas?

  How do you pray for his safe return, knowing what you know?

  Her fingers toy with the etched metal buttons on the cardigan he’d taken off and draped around her shoulders when he’d spotted her here in the February chill. She presses her nose into the soft wool, breathing him in, sneaking a glance at him.

  He’s thinner since she’d last seen him, and his textured hair is longer—not a full afro, but shaggy and tousled, like Jimi Hendrix.

  Twilight shadows don’t mask the long scars on his face.

  Surgical incisions, he’d told her last summer when she’d first noticed them. He’d been injured when he and a group of fellow NAACP Youth Council demonstrators had been attacked by a mob of two hundred white men armed with makeshift clubs outside a luncheonette. His jaw had been broken; a second blow had shattered his foot and left him with a lifelong limp.

  Where had her husband been on that day, Jacksonville’s now-infamous Axe Handle Saturday?

  August 1960 . . .

  Travis would have been sixteen years old, cruising the streets, riding the waves, watching Hitchcock’s Psycho at the drive-in with girls who wore red lipstick. Girls like Amy Connors and Debbie Mason; prissy, pretty girls who’d made Melody’s little sister’s junior high school days miserable.

  Born just eighteen months apart, Melody and Eleanor had been inseparable. Melly and Ellie, everyone called them. In the summer of 1960, Melody had been fourteen; Ellie thirteen, and ill, and dying, and lying in a casket with her hands clasped across the pale pink silk bodice Honeybee had chosen.

  Her sister would have hated spending eternity in that childish dress that didn’t do a thing for her scrawny figure. She’d have hated that the undertaker had curled her long black hair into unnatural corkscrews, and the lipstick . . .

  Before Ellie got sick, she and Melody had futilely begged their mother to let them wear red lipstick, like Marilyn Monroe. This lipstick was as sickly pink as the unnatural color on Ellie’s cheeks, freckles hidden behind pale makeup. She could have been a stranger lying there, but it was Ellie in a death mask.

  Amy and Debbie had been the first to arrive, crying into lace handkerchiefs, seeking macabre dibs on the loss. People who’d never known Ellie had wept as if they had, touching her hand as they filed past, talking about what a wonderful girl she’d been.

  Ellie would have hated it, all of it. She didn’t like attention. That’s why she never sang for anyone but the family, even though her voice was every bit as lovely as Honeybee’s and better, back then, than Melody’s.

  Daddy stood between the casket and Melody, nodding and shaking hands. Honeybee wailed and moaned and sometimes fainted dead away. Not just there, at the funeral home, but for weeks afterward. Months.

  Melody’s own grief had been devastating, but her parents’ sorrow was unbearable. Even their longtime housekeeper, Raelene, was shattered. Some days, the household adults were hypervigilant with Melody, as though she, too, might succumb if they turned their backs for an instant. Other days they barely seemed to notice her, and she could escape to the beach. She’d walk for hours, finding some strange measure of reassurance in predictable tidal rhythms, scooping up the occasional gleaming black shark’s tooth deposited amid shell shards in her path, remembering a time when there’d been two sets of barefoot prints along the scalloped edge of hard-packed, glistening sand.

  “Melody . . .” Cyril’s voice drags Melody back to the present. He reaches for her hand. Travis’s wedding band glitters in the starlight before his fingers close over it. “I don’t know what to do. You and me, we can’t be together. Not just because you’re married. Not even just because of who you’re married to.”

  “Well, what if I give the baby up for adoption?”

  Until this moment, she hadn’t even considered the idea. But now that it’s out there, it holds terrible, heartbreaking logic.

  “You think people are likely to adopt a biracial baby?”

  She nods.

  “Decent people?” Her heart sinks as he goes on, “And you think a married woman can give up a baby for adoption without her husband’s consent?”

  “Well, then, what if . . .” She takes a deep breath and utters the awful sentence that’s been eating away at her for months now, but especially the last few days, since the Tet began. “What if Travis doesn’t come home?”

  He stiffens and releases her hand. “Don’t say that.”

  “He’s a soldier in combat. If he doesn’t make it . . .”

  “That wouldn’t change a thing for you and me.”

  “But I’d be a widow, not—”

  “A white widow. And I would still be—I will always be—a Black man. Marriage between us is against the law.”

  “Laws are changing.”

  “Not around these parts. Not anytime soon.”

  He’s right. No Southern state has yet repealed its law against interracial marriage, despite last summer’s Supreme Court unanimous unconstitutionality ruling.

  “Don’t you see? Nothing that happens, nothing we can say, nothing we can do, will ever change anything,” he tells her. “We are who we are. We are where we are.”

  She’s silent, resting her right hand on her belly, feeling a quickening within. It’s probably just her imagination, anxiety, hunger pains. But maybe not. Maybe the child—Cyril’s child—wants to make itself known.

  Or maybe Travis’s child is issuing a warning.

  “Then what are we going to do?” she asks.

  Cyril stands. “We need to think on it. But you best be getting home now. It’s late.”

  “I don’t want to go back there.”

  “You have to.”

  “I’m so sick of all my life, doing what I have to do, what I’m supposed to do, pretending to feel the way I’m supposed to feel.”

  “It’s what we all do. That’s just how it is.”

  “Not out here. You don’t understand. Things are different here.”

  “Things are different everywhere.”

  She’d expected more from him than oppositional platitudes. But maybe that’s what he’s hearing from her. She needs to explain so that he’ll understand.

  “My mother . . . she’s impossible.”

  “Impossible? Now, I don’t think that’s—”

  “She wants me to join her bridge club!”

  “Bridge club! Well, now, it’s no wonder you’re getting all worked up!” He shakes his head in mock dismay. “You might as well march off to ’Nam.”

  “I’m serious! Please don’t be like them—like everyone else. Please listen to me!”

  “I’m sorry.” He sits down beside her again. “I’m listening.”

  “My mother just . . . she wants me to be excited about buying venetian blinds. She wants me to be more ladylike.” She struggles to put her frustration into words that will make him grasp what her life will be like if she goes back there. “She wants me to be . . . just like her.”

  “Isn’t that what every mother wants?”

  “I don’t want my daughter to be anything like me. I want her to be whoever she wants to be and feel whatever she feels.”

  “Daughter?”

  Melody closes her eyes and sees pink yarn, tiny sleeves. Sees blood dripped on leather pumps. December, up Macon way . . .

  Her eyes snap open. “She’s going to be a fine human being, Cyril.”

  “She.”

  “Yes. She’s a girl.” She shrugs. “I know I don’t know it, but I do.”

  “Maternal instinct,” he says softly, and she nods.

  A little girl. Maybe she’ll have Melody’s high cheekbones, and Cyril’s warm brown eyes.

  N
ot Travis’s icy blue ones. She would never have been able to love Travis’s child the way she’ll love Cyril’s.

  Cyril is a good man.

  Travis, she’d discovered after she’d married him and he’d flown away to Vietnam, is a hateful, cold-blooded killer whose parting words still ring in her ears.

  “He’s the devil, and she’s his wife. That makes her the devil, too.”

  Chapter Five

  Tuesday, February 13, 1968

  The Bronx

  According to the printed school lunch menu posted outside the cafeteria, it’s Italian Spaghetti Day. Gypsy would have guessed that based on the line for food that stretches out the door, and the mouthwatering smell of garlic and tomatoes permeating the corridors.

  Famished, she pushes past everyone. She can’t afford to buy the hot lunch, or the cold lunch, or the little carton of milk, for that matter.

  Every day, she brings a brown bag and eats alone wherever she can find a table that hasn’t already been staked out, territory marked by stacks of textbooks and purses and sweaters draped over empty chairs.

  Often, as today, she winds up at the end of a table adjacent to the big trash can that’s already full of ripening garbage from the earlier lunch periods. She always does her best not to let the smell get to her, trying to lose herself in a textbook, or sometimes doing her homework between bites of whatever she’d scrounged up from home.

  Today, it’s two stale slices of Wonder Bread smeared with as much peanut butter as she could scrape from a jar most people would have considered empty after the last use. But her father’s payday is a week away, and there’s rarely much left over for groceries. She’d shoplifted the peanut butter in January, and bought the bread with a quarter she’d found on the sidewalk.

  Though her eyes are trained on her open notebook, her ears are focused on the conversation at a nearby table. A wide pillar blocks the occupants from her view, but she recognizes the voices—Sharon Walker and Connie Barbero. She usually manages to tune out their chatter, but today one of them mentioned Greg Martinez.

  He’s in her last period class, and sits in the back row with a posse of popular boys. She’d dismissed him along with the others before she’d noticed his name on the first quarter honor roll right above her own. Ever since then, she’s had her eye on him. He lives in her neighborhood, on a block that’s not much better than her own, though she doesn’t know which building is his.

  Whenever she sees him on the street, or in the hallway, he always smiles and says hello, unlike his friends.

  Unlike anyone else, really, in this school.

  When she was younger, she’d had friends. Not the kind who go to each other’s houses after school and share sleepovers, because Gypsy never had a mother, or a father she’d want anyone to meet. But back at PS 77, the other girls used to talk to her, and eat lunch with her, and invite her to skip rope and play jacks at recess.

  Even then, she’d been aware of her own poverty, but she was far from the only poor girl at school. Being one of the smartest and prettiest balanced things out.

  That had changed in junior high. There were more kids, some significantly better off, with scorn for the impoverished. Confidence shaken, she’d retreated, dwelling on the shabbiness of her clothes, that her apartment was a dump, that her father was . . .

  “A psycho lunatic,” she’d overheard Carol-Ann Ellis telling Sharon and Connie one day over a smoke in the girls’ bathroom. All three had been unaware that Gypsy was there, washing her hands at the sink. At first, she hadn’t realized that her former friends were even talking about Oran. But apparently, Carol-Ann had run into him on the street as he was preaching one of his sidewalk sermons.

  Sometimes, he does it in street clothes. But occasionally, depending on the audience he wants to attract, he’ll wear a priest’s collar, or a robe, or some other religious garment.

  That day, he must have been wearing a turban. The others giggled as Carol-Ann imitated him, striding around with a towel wrapped around her head.

  “Repent, ye sinners, for the end is nigh . . .”

  Looking into the mirror, Gypsy had seen tears spring to her eyes and red-hot shame flame her face, and in the background, filmy with tobacco haze, the other girls were seeing her. Wide-eyed, Carol-Ann had clapped a hand over her own mouth, but a snort of laughter escaped on a puff of smoke. Gypsy turned and walked past their little coven without a word, head held high, tears held back.

  As soon as she stepped out into the hall, she heard raucous laughter erupt in the bathroom.

  Junior high had been lonely, but that was all right. Gypsy didn’t need girlfriends. Nor did she need boyfriends.

  Not then, anyway. Now she thinks about Greg Martinez a lot, and she wonders what it would be like to kiss him. Judging by the wistful way she’s caught him gazing at her, she’s suspected that he’s been wondering the same thing.

  Today’s cafeteria conversation seems to confirm it. The girls are saying that he’s going to ask someone in his biology class to the Valentine’s dance. They’re filled with disdain over his choice, so it has to be Gypsy. There are only half a dozen girls in the class, and one is Carol-Ann Ellis. Sharon and Connie certainly don’t hate her. Of the other girls, two are already going steady, and two are nowhere near pretty enough for Greg, who looks like a movie star with black hair, soft eyes, and a sensitive mouth.

  “If he was really going to ask, he already would have,” Connie is telling Sharon. “The dance is Friday night!”

  “But Valentine’s Day’s tomorrow, and he wants to do it then. He’s going to bring a red rose to class and ask her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Vinnie! How else?” Sharon’s steady is one of Greg’s best friends.

  “That’s so romantic! Like a marriage proposal. I hate her, don’t you?”

  “Of course! Who doesn’t?”

  That clinches it for Gypsy. They’re definitely talking about her. But this time, their words don’t sting.

  Who cares how they feel about her? Greg is going to ask her out.

  “She doesn’t deserve him. Why her?”

  “Well, I heard he’s kind of shy,” Connie says, “and he figured out she has a crush on him.”

  “Like you have on Ricky Pflueger?”

  “At least I’m not obvious like she is, the way she goes around fawning and mooning and—”

  “Shh! Here she comes!”

  It isn’t me. I’m not the one.

  Gypsy peers around the pillar to see who it is, sandwich clogging her mouth like a wet sock when she sees Carol-Ann Ellis joining Sharon and Connie.

  Her family isn’t well-off by any stretch. She, too, lives in Gypsy’s neighborhood. But Mr. Ellis works at Alexander’s and Mrs. Ellis works in a beauty parlor. Carol-Ann reaps the benefits. She’s wearing a wide-belted, patch-pocketed pastel minidress and white go-go boots. Her honey-colored hair is newly cut short with long bangs. Beneath the sleek side part, plucked brows and false lashes make her blue eyes look enormous.

  Carol-Ann’s so-called friends welcome her to the table, and the three of them put their heads together. What would happen if Gypsy walked over there and told Carol-Ann what the others had been saying about her?

  You think she’d believe you?

  Greg has made his choice. He prefers a girl who looks like—and has the personality and IQ of—a department store mannequin. Good for him. Good for her.

  Good for me, too.

  Still hungry, she realizes that she’d shoved what was left of her sandwich into the brown paper bag, now wadded into a ball and clenched in her fist. She turns, takes aim at the garbage can, and tosses. It goes right in. She leaves the cafeteria without a backward glance.

  Her father isn’t crazy. Judgment Day is coming, and when it does, they’ll all have to answer for their sins. Not Gypsy, though. The chosen ones—chosen by God, and not by Greg Martinez—will be in paradise. Then, her father says, none of this will matter.

  If only it didn�
��t matter so much now.

  Fernandina Beach, Florida

  Melody had written to Travis over the weekend, words catapulting out of her onto three sheets of paper in a pastel stationery pad. She told him she’d fallen in love with someone else, and that she’s expecting his child. She told him what she’d found in his drawer, that she can’t stay married to a hate-filled man, that she wants a divorce.

  She addressed an envelope to his APO and stamped it. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to tear off the pages and send them overseas.

  Honeybee had telephoned a couple of hours ago. “Any word on Travis?”

  “Now, don’t you think I’d have called you if there was?” she’d snapped, then said, “Oh, Mother, I’m sorry. But I can’t stand the phone ringing. Every time I hear it, I think . . .”

  “They wouldn’t call you if something had happened. They’d show up in person, like they did across the street when the Bradys’ son—”

  “For heaven’s sake!”

  “I’m sorry, all I meant was—”

  “I know. I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to snap.”

  “Well, of course you’re on edge, what with all the waitin’ and worryin’. You’ll come for supper tonight, won’t you? Raelene made chicken and dumplings.”

  There’s no food in the house. She’s supposed to be eating for two, but she’s barely eaten for one. Still, she’d hesitated. Honeybee asks too many questions, gossips about everyone, notices everything.

  Melody has lived all her life in this quiet, lamplit neighborhood of old houses and small businesses, tall foliage and tropical fronds lining streets with alphabetical botanical names. Walking to her parents’ house for supper, she crosses Date Street, Cedar, Beech, and Ash, where she makes a left turn toward the river.

  The moon is full and the weather unseasonably balmy, but she senses a storm brewing out at sea. Or maybe it’s just inside her.