“I could not even look at rich food the whole nine months I was expecting you and your sister. Cake, pastries, ice cream—just mention pralines, and I’d just . . .” She sighs an almost gleeful little sigh, bent on making up for months of shared pregnancy tales. “But then, my goodness, out of nowhere, I developed an uncontrollable craving for lemon icebox pie. I just couldn’t get enough of it! Remember, darling?”
Melody’s father shrugs. “Poppet’s never been fond of dessert. She’ll be just fine.”
“Of course she will! This is the grandest time in a woman’s life. I’m so happy for you, Melody. I can hardly wait for April.”
Acid bubbles into her throat. She swallows it back as Andy Williams sings about fate pulling the strings.
Her in-laws insist on driving her home in their new car. Her father-in-law walks her to the door, a hand under her elbow.
“You should leave a light on when you go out at night, Melody.”
“I thought I had,” she murmurs, fitting the key into the lock.
“You’re just like Doris,” he says with a rare grin.
Never, she thinks, turning the key.
“She was forgetful, too, when she was expecting,” Bob goes on. “Sometimes I thought she might be losing her doggone mind. Oh, well. You have a good night.”
“Thank you. And thank you for the ride.”
“No problem. Family, you know . . .” He tips his hat and heads down the walk to the car, and her mother-in-law.
Doris leans out the window. “Melody? See that you send that letter to Travis first thing in the morning.”
“Oh, I will.”
She locks the door and leans against it, exhaling at last.
“What am I going to do?” she asks the dark, empty room.
She turns on the lamp she could have sworn she’d left burning, and goes into the kitchen to find the letter she’d written Travis over the weekend.
Now that the family knows about the baby, there will be no keeping it from Travis. She’ll have to rewrite her letter, only telling him that news. The rest can wait.
She sighs, opens a drawer, and finds a pen, her mind already arranging and rearranging the words she’ll write to Travis. She turns and grabs the pad of paper, wondering if she should destroy the confession she’d written and start fresh in a few days, or weeks, whenever she gets word that he’s safe. Or that he is not, in which case there will be no need—
Melody gasps.
“What in the world . . . ?” she whispers, gaping at the paper in her hand. Blank.
She whirls back to the counter. Maybe she’d torn off the pages she’d written after all, sealed them into the envelope. But the envelope is gone.
You’re just like Doris.
“Never!” She must have put the letter away for safekeeping. She checks the kitchen drawers, the desk in the living room, her nightstand, and the dog-eared pages of To Kill a Mockingbird.
She goes through the entire house again room by room, and once more inch by inch. Even that doesn’t take very long.
There’s no sign of the letter.
“She was forgetful, too, when she was expecting.”
Could she have mailed it and forgotten?
Had she imagined writing it in the first place?
“Sometimes, I thought she might be losing her doggone mind.”
She doesn’t feel as though she’s gone insane. But insane people probably never do.
Back in the kitchen, she stares down at the blank page and sees faint indentations. When she holds it up to the light, she can make out several of the words she’d written, superimposed over others.
The letter had been real.
What on earth could have happened to it?
Around midnight, Marceline walks her son to the door.
“You want some biscuits to take with you? You barely touched your victuals.”
“I told you I wasn’t hungry.”
She’d insisted on heating frogmore for him anyway. It gave her something to do, standing at the stove, stirring bubbling stew in the cast-iron pot. Anything was better than just sitting there across the table, facing those big brown eyes of his.
Boddun’ eyes, her mama would’ve called them.
Botherin’ about what’s going to become of them—not just this baby, and the buckruh woman, but all of them. The whole world’s gone crazy—people fighting, hating, killing colored people.
“All right, then, Cyril, you get along home. Dayclean be here before you know it.”
He opens the door. “Well, look who’s here. Good evening, Ms. Maisie.”
Marceline’s fat orange-and-white tabby sits on the mat wearing an indignant scowl as though she’d been knocking for hours. She strolls over the threshold and nudges her furry head against Cyril’s ankles.
From the time he was a young’un, he’s had a way with God’s creatures. Marceline has seen dolphins flank him in the sea like bodyguards, and butterflies bypass a patch of blooming clover to alight on her boy’s shoulder.
He steps outside, then turns back. “T’engky, Mama.”
“What for?”
“For letting me talk. For not judging me.”
“Only one can judge you is the good Lord above, Cyril. You going to talk, what am I going to do but listen?”
“Tell me what to do.”
She shrugs. “Ain’t up to me now, is it. Or you. You ain’t the one growing a child in your belly.”
“Well, what do you think Melody should do?”
“Nothing she can do, is there, ’cept wait for the baby to be born come May. You best hope Travis Hunter won’t be back home by then.”
“I hope he’s not home by then, or soon after, or ev—”
“Shush, boy. Don’t you stand in your daddy’s house wishin’ a soldier dead.”
“It’s your house, Mama. You’re the one who was born here. And this man . . . he’s not a hero. This isn’t even a war our country should be fighting.”
“You the prezzydent?” she asks, sounding like her own Grammy. “Get on home now, son. You be safe.” She hesitates, then reaches out and gives his shoulder a little pat.
He raises an eyebrow but says nothing, just turns and walks out into the night.
She isn’t much for expressing her feelings or showing affection. When he was a baby, yes, and into his toddler years, but . . .
Not in a long time. Not since she’d lost her husband. A woman can’t just go on with life the way it used to be. A woman—a widow—can’t be who she used to be, how she used to be. Everything is different after your husband is killed.
In the early days after Cyril, Sr., had shipped out overseas, she’d longed to feel his arms around her again. After the telegram, when she knew she never would, the ache became unbearable. She’d decided that it’s easier to just keep your distance from folks, even the ones you care about. Even your own son. Raising a child on hugs and kisses and sweet promises seemed as foolhardy as raising him on cookies and pies.
She feels unsettled, standing in the doorway watching her son cross the yard in the moonlight. He reminds her not of his father, but of her own father, who’d taught himself how to read and wanted her to get a good education. But he’d died of the Spanish influenza when Marceline was ten, leaving her mother with five daughters to raise. Firstborn Marceline left school to take care of the others, and she didn’t need anyone takin’ care of her. She came of age determined to be a spinster. No man was man enough for her, and she’d had her fill of running a household.
That’s what she’d told Cyril, Sr., when they met. He’d thrown back his head and laughed, and asked her where she’d been all his life.
“Right here on Barrow Island, and I ain’t fixing to leave, either.”
Neither was he. When that longline shrimp boat headed south two days later without him, Marceline and Cyril, Sr., stood arm in arm on the beach, watching it until it disappeared. She was in her late twenties then, and head over heels in love.
She
locks up the house and goes through the rooms extinguishing lights, pausing to gaze at the large red leather satchel that sits on a bench at the foot of her bed because there’s nowhere else to store it. It’s packed full of all the things Cyril, Sr., had left behind when he’d up and enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked. Clothes, mostly, and some books and a few precious family photographs.
Back in the parlor, she sits on the davenport where she’d finally accepted her husband’s marriage proposal thirty-five years ago, listening for his voice amid droning marsh bugs and a hooting owl in a distant perch.
He’s been gone decades more than the few years they were married, but the dead are always around and can speak to you if you’re open to their presence. Other people’s ears don’t hear, and sometimes she’s not even sure her own ears are hearing him, but her heart surely does.
“I don’t like this either,” she whispers, shaking her head, her long braids swishing and swaying over her shoulders. “Anyone finds out about that woman and her baby, and our boy is going to face a world of trouble. Worse than before. Way worse.”
She shudders, remembering what had happened when he and his NAACP Youth Council friends had staged a peaceful protest at a whites-only lunch counter. They’d been attacked by a white mob that swelled and rioted through the streets attacking all people of color.
“Buckruh been comin’ around here, last couple’a weeks or so,” she goes on. “Checkin’ things out, I s’pose. Folks are scared. Not me.”
“I’m the one goin’ off to war,” he’d said, all those years ago. “If I ain’t scared, then you can’t be scared.”
That was the last conversation they’d ever had when they were both on this earthly plane.
“You ain’t gotta do anything but wait for me to come home, woman. So what are you boddun’ about?”
He’d made it sound so easy. The waiting, and the going off to war.
It would have been hell even if there had just been one war to fight, with Cyril, Sr., and his fellow Black soldiers fighting alongside the buckruh troops. But it hadn’t happened that way.
Marceline doesn’t know exactly what her husband endured over there, and he’d never had a chance to tell her. But she’s heard stories, and she has her suspicions, and though that war is long over, some battles wage on.
Travis Hunter isn’t the only violent, hate-filled buckruh around these parts. A carful of troublemakers has been spotted on the island lately. They didn’t say anything to anyone, or trespass on private property, but they shouldn’t be out joyriding around in a fancy blue car in these parts.
“Heard tell it’s not haint blue, but more turquoise-like,” she tells her dead husband. “Up to no good. And if they find out about what that boy’s been doin’, and this baby . . . You need to protect him, and so does the good Lord above.”
Marceline sighs, stands, and goes to the bedroom, bracing for another sleepless night.
Oran takes a last look at Gypsy before leaving home. Deep in slumber, she’s serene, an angel. She’ll never know he’s gone. He’ll be back before sunrise.
He takes the subway to Sheepshead Bay. Perched at the southern edge of Brooklyn, the neighborhood lies within the perimeter of America’s largest metropolis, but it feels like a small seaside village.
As a child, Oran had spent a lot of time here, never with his mother. Still in her teens when he’d started school, Pamela always had better things to do. Whenever her parents forced him on her, she’d take him to the movies, or to ride the rides at Coney Island. The carnival atmosphere was more her speed.
Oran’s grandparents, however, had loved Sheepshead Bay. It reminded them of the coastal Connecticut town they’d visited after his grandfather got back from fighting in the trenches during the First World War.
Sometimes, when Pamela was in a rare teasing mood, she’d remind her parents that she’d been born nine months later, and ask them whether she’d been conceived in Connecticut. Her father would turn red and retreat, and her mother would purse her lips and tell her daughter not to say such things.
“What things?” Pamela would ask, a gleam in her eye. “It’s not like you hadn’t already been married forever by then. It’s not like you were me, having a baby with any old—”
“Shush!”
Any old worthless piece of trash. Yeah, Oran knew. He’d found his father soon after his mother had managed to attach herself to an equally worthless piece of trash.
Eddie was in prison, last Oran knew. Maybe his mother is, too, or maybe she’s dead. If not, he hopes she thinks of him, of how she failed him, every day for the rest of her miserable life.
At least Pamela’s parents, while strict and old-fashioned, had been good to Oran. Sometimes, after church on a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon, they’d pack up a picnic lunch and ride the bus down to Sheepshead Bay. Out there, by the shimmery blue, boat-bobbing water, his grandparents didn’t fret about money, work, Pamela’s behavior, Oran’s future. They were relaxed, laughing and reminiscing about that long-ago vacation in Connecticut.
Oran’s never been to New England. He has, however, seen plenty of movies about charming towns where neighbors chat over white picket fences.
Like Shadow of a Doubt, an Alfred Hitchcock thriller he’d seen on a cold winter night very much like this one. Pamela had paid for his ticket with the money his grandfather had given her, and then gone off for a rendezvous, leaving Oran in the theater to watch the feature alone. It was set in an idyllic, peaceful community where life is just about perfect . . . until an outsider shows up, and bad things—terrible, deadly things—begin to happen.
As a child, in broad daylight, Oran had felt a sense of belonging here in Sheepshead Bay. On this cold February night, he is without a doubt an outsider. But he’s not alone.
His heart pounds faster than his feet along the pavement, and he summons Deuteronomy to calm himself.
“And shall say unto them, Hear, O Israel, ye approach this day unto battle against your enemies: let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be ye terrified because of them; For the Lord your God is He that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.”
He presses on, past Italian pizzerias long closed for the night and Irish pubs going strong at this hour on a weeknight. The moon is fat and full, riding high above the steepled bell tower at Saint Paul’s redbrick Catholic church. Two days ago, from an alley across the street, he’d watched Christina climb the steps with her parents and younger sister for mass. In the days ahead, she’ll trail their wooden coffins down the stone steps.
The block is lined with tall trees, parked cars, row houses with darkened windows, a smattering of shuttered shops. His footsteps slow, and his pulse picks up as he reaches the beige brick duplex.
The Myers family lives on the first floor.
Oran turns to scan the street, making sure there are no witnesses. Then he makes his way around the house to the back, pulling on a hand-knit balaclava to cover most of his face. He deftly jimmies open a window he’s practiced on several times since he’d met Christina.
Once, he’d even climbed inside and crept through the house, memorizing the layout, figuring out who sleeps where. The two daughters, Christina and Allison, share a bedroom across from their parents. Twin beds in both rooms.
Both doors are closed.
He opens the door to the master bedroom, slips over the threshold, and closes it behind him.
“When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.”
He stands just inside the door, waiting for his eyes to acclimate, listening to deep, rhythmic breathing and gentle snoring. Christina’s parents are asleep. Moonlight filters through the lace curtains. Clothing hangs on the bedpost—an orange shirt and striped bell bottoms he’d seen the father wearing. Oran approaches the closer bed, gloved hand clutching the meat cleaver he’d borrowed from the kitchen.
He leans over and whispers close to the father’s e
ar. “Hey, man . . .”
A little sighing sound from the bed. The room is bright enough for Oran to see him open drowsy eyes.
“Shhh. I’m here for Christina. I need her to come with me, you dig?”
The man’s gaze widens. He opens his mouth. Oran clamps his hand over it, muffling his cry. The wife stirs.
“Shhh,” Oran says again, so close to the man’s ear that his lips brush the flesh. “All I need to know is if you’re cool with Christina coming with me.”
“And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.”
“You with me, man? If you’re not going to give me any trouble with this, just nod, and then I can just—”
The man shifts violently, trying to wrench himself upward.
“And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it.”
Oran plunges the knife into his throat.
Melody drives to Barrow Island just before dawn, moments stringing along in her memory like twinkle lights.
Cyril showing her how to feed wild horses from her hand. Cyril lying in a patch of shady grass, reading aloud. Cyril floating beside her in the warm sea as fat white fish jumped and splashed around them and dolphins breached out past the break. Cyril on the beach, eyes closed, as she sang “At Last,” his favorite song. Cyril pulling her down beside him, saying, “Baby, you sing it better than Etta James herself.” Melody laughing, protesting. Cyril silencing her with a kiss.
Oh, how they’d tried not to let it happen. But Melody has always been “persistent as a bloodthirsty skeeter,” as her daddy likes to say.
Later—not that first night, but soon after—he’d claimed that he had indeed been waiting for her. For the idea of her. For a woman who’d spark hope in his soul in this miserable, hate and war-ridden world, he’d explained as she traced his bare chest with the hand that wasn’t wearing a gold band.
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