It seemed everybody around him was calling on Jesus except his mother, who grimaced every time somebody said his name. The biggest part of the town was there, sitting in rows and rows of straight-back funeral chairs, men sniffling and bashfully brushing their noses with the tops of their knuckles while offering their pocket handkerchiefs to their wives. Even his father wiped away tears as big as summer raindrops. Every now and then, from directly behind him, he heard the sobs of his aunt Onareen, the only one from Hazel’s family to attend.
“How long is Davie going to have to stay with Jesus, Momma?” Johnny finally whispered.
She acted as if she hadn’t heard him. Her dry stare was focused on Brother Dear, who shone brighter than sun on snow in his white suit. The preacher was now saying something about Jesus’s master plan and about never, never, never asking why.
Still staring at Brother Dear, Hazel shredded her tissue until there was nothing but a mound of white bits on the lap of her black silk dress. Floyd reached over and brushed her off and then rested his hand over hers, stilling them.
Returning from the funeral, Johnny asked his momma from the backseat how Davie was going to find his way back to the house. “Will Jesus set him loose at night? Oughten we come back in the car and get him so he don’t get lost?”
His mother swung her head around in the seat. “What are you going on about?” she shouted. “Davie ain’t coming home. Never! Do you understand me? Jesus don’t let nobody go once he gets aholt of them!”
Johnny sat stone still in the backseat. He was too startled to cry.
Floyd turned to Hazel. “Why are you yelling at the boy? Why are you yelling at all? Why ain’t you crying? Everybody else is. It ain’t right, you being dry-eyed at your own son’s funeral.”
Hazel looked accusingly at her husband. “Ain’t you the one always saying we can’t go back and change the past? That spilt milk ain’t worth crying over?”
After taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out, Floyd shifted to his low serious voice, the one he used when he felt he was getting to the nub of the matter. “I’ll tell you why you ain’t crying, Hazel. It’s because you’re stinking drunk. It ain’t cute no more. You get mean when you drink. Just like your daddy. And I’m sure everybody at the funeral smelt it.”
“I ain’t drunk, and don’t you talk about my daddy.” Hazel gritted her teeth. “And I’ll cry whenever somebody tells me why Davie is gone.” She shot Floyd a look that accused him of holding back the answer from her all along.
“Well. . .” Floyd said, not appearing so sure of himself. Finally he ventured, “Now Jesus tells us we got to—”
Hazel flew hot again. “I done heard enough about what Jesus tells us! Jesus and his many mansions. Jesus and his big ol’ everlasting arms. If His arms is so big and strong, how come they didn’t catch Davie? Tell me that!”
Floyd didn’t offer an answer. When Davie had died, Floyd and his big ol’ arms had been there, too. Floyd had been working on the lawn mower when Davie decided he wanted to play “Catch me” from the porch. Certain as always that his daddy was watching, Davie stepped to the rail edge and stretched out his arms.
Only Johnny had been watching. It was he who had heard his brother’s voice call out “Catch me,” sounding more like the chirp of a bird, and only Johnny who saw Davie drop off the man-tall porch. It wasn’t until his father heard the soft thud on the grass and then something resembling the sound of a twig snapping that he glanced up from the mower to see Davie lying in front of him motionless, his arms akimbo, neck broken, facing Floyd with only the slightest look of surprise.
In the autumn that followed the funeral, Hazel’s unshed tears hung dark and heavy on the family’s horizon like an approaching Delta storm. The drinking continued. Hazel said if she couldn’t drink, she would surely suffocate. She said, “Drinking is like breaking open a window to yell out of.”
Floyd said he was trying to understand, but all he thought her drinking did was make her mad. He said every time he looked at her, all he saw in her eyes was a fight ready to happen, and he couldn’t afford being around somebody that negative all the time. Not with everything they had riding on his positive attitude. Finally, he moved into a separate bedroom.
They left Davie’s bed and toys and clothes untouched, strengthening Johnny’s belief that his brother was coming back. Several times a week he awoke to his father silhouetted in the doorway, looking toward Davie’s bed for minutes at a time. One night, after a particularly loud fight between his parents, Floyd came to the doorway and stood there as usual, staring. This time, Johnny thought he heard a sniffling sound.
“Hey, Big Monkey,” Johnny called out to him.
“Hey, Little Monkey,” his father whispered, in a way that made Johnny’s heart hurt.
“He’s not back yet, Daddy,” he said, trying to comfort him. “I’ll holler at you when he gets home.”
Later, after his father had gone to bed, Johnny woke to the touch of a hand running through his hair. As his mother knelt by his bedside, smelling strongly of medicine, she whispered the oddest question in his ear.
“Who do you love the most? Me or your daddy?”
Certain of the answer she wanted, he said, “You, Momma.”
She bent over and kissed him on his forehead and said before leaving, “Don’t tell your daddy. You’re on my side. Do you hear?”
His mother’s question tore the world in two for Johnny. It was like the day he had seen the setting sun and the rising moon in the sky at the same time, opposite each other. Until that moment, he believed they were the same entity, the silver moon being the soft evening face of the hot, laboring sun. Yet when his mother asked him that question and made him choose between his parents, Johnny grasped how separate his parents really were. They traveled in their own orbits. And most terrifying of all, there could be one without the other.
Chapter Fourteen
ONE WING HANNAH’S
Vida reckoned that if the woman who plopped down uninvited at her table wasn’t drunk, she was within hollering distance of it. She called herself Sweet Pea, and her shiny black hair, greased down and hot-combed, hugged a plump face glistening with sweat. She grinned at Vida like they were best friends.
“You ought to get out of them fields, honey,” the woman lost no time advising. “What are you? Nineteen? Twenty? You wasting yourself. Gal, you do a lot better in town. The mens like your type.”
Sweet Pea smiled brightly at Vida with a mouth full of gold teeth and then winked. Motioning toward Vida’s chest with an empty Mason jar, she said, “You young and pretty, even with that head of drawed-up hair. And you probably toting some nice boobies in that sack you wearing.”
Shifting self-consciously in her chair, Vida yanked at her loose calico dress, trying to pull out some of the slack. Then she stuck her ragged hands under the table and out of sight. It vexed her to think a looped-up stranger could tell straightaway that she had been reduced to being a fieldworker. Especially in a smoke-crowded juke lit by two dim bulbs dangling from a tar-paper ceiling.
Vida made a show of searching the room, partly to defy the busybody stare of her table companion and partly to locate her brother. All around her couples were close-dancing in the cigarette haze to a blues-scarred voice rising from the Seeburg.
She didn’t have any business among these people. If she could find Willie, she would fuss at him good. Coming to One Wing Hannah’s had been her brother’s idea, and now he had disappeared, saddling her with some looped-up gal whose nature had obviously gone to her head. Knowing Willie, he was probably outside skylarking with the no-account men in the yard, throwing dice and passing bottles.
As she watched the door, a tall honey-skinned man with a purplish red shirt and green pointed shoes sauntered into the shack. Almost instinctively, the gold-toothed woman spun around and caught his eye. He shot Sweet Pea a wolfish smile. Sweet Pea leaned into Vida and said confidentially, “Look see? Three dollars right there. Five if he was white. H
ow many pounds of cotton you got to pick for five dollars?”
“You do it with white men?” She couldn’t imagine somebody doing it with a white man if they didn’t have to. The thought sent a million little bug feet traipsing over her skin.
“Now, don’t look at me thataway. It don’t rub off. You tell me which sounds smarter, picking the white man’s cotton for two dollars a day or laying on it for five? And that’s an hour. I’m talking year-round.” She winked at Vida. “I didn’t pass through the eighth grade for nothing. I got that deal figgered.”
Sweet Pea could figger all she wanted. White people scared Vida to death, the white man with his face as sharp as the steel head of a hatchet and eyes that cut to the bone like the wind on a wet winter day, swaggering around the countryside, unthinking as a cocked pistol. But it was the white woman that vexed Vida the most. Her nose poked in the air like she was all the time smelling dog doo. Acting all soft and breakable when her man was around and conniving and fish-blooded when he wasn’t. She had learned the story behind what happened to Mose Wright’s nephew, Emmett, only a few weeks ago. White woman claimed the boy was cutting his eyes at her. Said he wolf-whistled at her. That woman cried to anybody who would listen that a real man would do something about it and went on sniveling until last week they pulled that poor boy out of the Hopalachie dressed in barbed wire weighted down with gin parts. His own momma couldn’t recognize him.
While Vida was having her thoughts about white people, the jukers around her hushed all at once and the room went still. Vida looked up and froze. There stood Satan himself. For years, Vida and Willie argued over who would kill him first. As she often did when she thought of the man, she reached down and through her dress fingered the buckshot still lodged in her thigh from that night long ago, so as to never forget the pain he brought into her life.
Billy Dean Brister was surveying the shack like he was trying to see if there were any butts that needed kicking tonight. Then he strode over to the owner with his hand out.
One Wing Hannah, her hefty bulk propped up on a stool behind the wood plank that passed for a bar, handed him an envelope with her remaining arm. Vida watched as Hannah, with the armpit of her stump, got a grip on a bottle from the shelf behind her. The sheriff gave her a nasty look, then took it anyway.
He scanned the room again, and when his eyes got to Vida’s table, they came to a dead stop. Vida did her best to keep up her stare, wanting him to know she wasn’t the least bit afraid, yet avoiding the eyes of a white man was a hard habit to break. Her eyes dropped to the table. She didn’t need to look at him. The face of Billy Dean Brister was clearly engraved in her mind. For so long he had been a constant presence.
The sheriff had been a regular visitor to her family’s house. Late at night, he pulled his car up close and sat there, his lights illuminating the inside of her bedroom, while she waited for him to kill her or leave. It was a warning to Vida that she had better keep their secret from the Senator.
When she peeked up again, she saw it wasn’t her that the sheriff was studying. He probably didn’t recognize the poor sharecropper’s daughter Vida had become. Instead, he settled his eyes on her table companion, his face devoid of any expression except the usual contempt. He took his loot and walked out as abruptly as he’d come in, like a man with a route to make.
Sweet Pea nodded at the door. “And girl, there goes seven dollars. And he pay in advance.”
“You done it with—?”
“Mess a times,” she said. “We go to his daddy’s old burned-out shack up in the woods.”
Vida let go such a look of loathing it would have sobered the woman up if the light had been better.
Sweet Pea squared her shoulders. “Well, it ain’t like we do it all that much,” she said. “And some days we don’t do it at all. They times he just wants somebody to drink with and talk to. Then he go to sleep.” She shrugged. “On or off, still cost him seven dollars.”
“Y’all talk? Both of you?” Vida asked, not able to imagine the sheriff having a conversation with this woman.
“I don’t talk, hon. He do the talking. I listens. Sometimes.”
Vida leaned in and lifted her brows. “Yeah? What he say?”
Sweet Pea became animated. “Girl, one time he got some drunk and started talking out of his head about his momma and daddy. About the night that old shack got set afire. Talked like it was happening right then and there! How his daddy gets crazy and throws the kerosene lamp in the window with his momma still inside. Then how he passes out in the dirt yard. How the whole place explodes and his momma comes out screaming to Jesus, running off the porch lit like a torch, dropping dead to the side of her husband. And him scrambling off on all fours trying to get away from his wife before he catches afire. The sheriff still a boy and watching it all happen, froze up with fright. Can’t make hisself go to neither of them. And he just a-screaming, ‘Momma! Daddy!’ Big drops of sweat on his face like he’s seeing it all over again. I tell you, honey, I was crying right along with him. Nearly broke my heart.”
The amount of pity Sweet Pea was wasting on the man disgusted Vida. Yet she knew she’d better act interested. “Ain’t that something? What else he talk about?”
“Well,” Sweet Pea said, “one night he give his wife a real badmouthing. Cried about how ugly she was and how she as cold as an outhouse in an ice storm. How she turned his two pishy little daughters against him. How his own family don’t think he ain’t nothing but po’ white trash. I figger mostly he go out to that old shack just to be rid of them.” The woman leaned in toward Vida, so close Vida could smell the rotten sweet smell of shine on her breath. “Girl, then he passes out and he talk some mo. Mostly babbles.”
“He talk in his sleep?”
Sweet Pea eyed Vida suspiciously. “What you care for, anyway? You ain’t trying to steal my trade, is you?”
Vida lowered her eyes. “I wondered if sometime he didn’t talk about a boy.”
“A boy? What boy?”
“Any boy,” Vida said.
Sweet Pea began tapping the bottom of her empty jar against the tabletop. “Like I done told you,” she said, sounding done with the conversation. “He ain’t got no boy. Only them two pishy girls.”
The woman cast her gaze over the room like she was ready for new company, yet Vida took no notice. A hundred thoughts swarmed at once.
Sweet Pea made a great show of raising the empty fruit jar to her lips, throwing back her head, and thumping the jar on the bottom to loosen any remaining drops clinging to the sides. She rimmed the mouth of the glass with a long pink tongue.
Before Vida could ask any more questions, the honey-skinned man with the green pointed shoes came over to the table. “You look thirsty tonight, girl! You as hot as me?”
Sweet Pea smiled gold at him, and then glanced back at Vida as if to say, “Watch this.”
The man began to rub his thigh into her shoulder to the rhythm of the music. Bending down, he moaned into her ear, loud enough for Vida to hear through the din.
“Umm. Umm. Sweet Pea. You feeling good tonight. How about you and me doing the drag, sugar? Then I put some more shinny in your jar.”
Sweet Pea began rubbing on him, gyrating her shoulder into his crotch yet talking to Vida at the same time. “Honey, if you don’t want a white man, then least find you a white woman.”
Sweet Pea snapped her fingers. “And Lordy, do I have the right one for you! I done a little piece of work for her few months back. She live in a big ol’ house in Delphi. That white lady needed somebody bad. Maybe still does. She be a piteous mess. Hazel Graham her name.”
Sweet Pea shook her head sadly. “Heard she just lost her boy. Must sure nuff be a wreck now.”
“Lost him?” Vida asked, still thinking about Nate. “Where she lose him at?”
“I don’t mean she sat him down and forgot him, girl. You crazy? I mean he be dead.”
Vida scowled at Sweet. “What that be to me? I ain’t got no tears for n
o white woman.”
“Whoo-ee!” Sweet Pea exclaimed, and then looked up at the man with a wink. “Ain’t she a hard-hearted one?”
The man grinned at Vida.
“All I’m saying,” Sweet Pea confided, “is play your cards right and you be the boss in that house. She don’t know her shit from Shinola.” Then she rose from the table in her tight dress of white satin, traveling up the man like a curl of smoke.
Vida had a thought. “She live anywhere near the sheriff?”
“Uh-huh. That’s right,” the woman said, not turning from the man as he led her away. “All them rich people live over there bunched up together like a wad of money.”
Vida shook her head disdainfully. No, she told herself, I ain’t studying on being no maid for no white woman. Yet, she argued, if it gets me within striking distance of the sheriff. . .
All at once One Wing Hannah started cussing like a mule skinner, grabbed her pistol from behind the bar, and hauled her two hundred and fifty pounds toward the door as if she were mounted on freshly greased wheels. “Where is that good-for-nothing devilish-eyed scound? That pretty boy about to have him two assholes to shit out of.”
“Willie!” Vida gasped. She watched as Hannah disappeared through the door. A second later a shot rang out.
In a flash Vida was on her feet and flying. She got to the gallery in time to see people in the yard scattering behind trees and diving under cars. The sweet smell of cordite still hung heavy in the thick summer air. In the middle of the yard One Wing Hannah was flapping her stump and pointing the gun with her good arm at Willie.
Vida grabbed a pool stick from one of the gawkers standing next to her, ready to break it on Hannah’s head. But Willie seemed unfazed. He stood there grinning like a child caught sneaking candy. That boy had nerves of steel.
“Nigger, I told you don’t you come ’round my place selling no hooch.”
Hannah had bolted down the steps so fast her wig slipped over to one side of her head. Her chest was heaving like two pigs crowding a trough.
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 10
