by Cynthia Bond
In 1940, Mussolini decided to join Hitler against France and Britain, France surrendered to Germany, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City and Ephram Jennings almost died from eating a persimmon. Ephram and Gubber had been plastering the bright orange fruit across their faces, into their mouths, until one of the seeds lodged itself in Ephram’s nose. Gubber tried to fish it out and managed to jam it in so deep that blood began to spurt. Gubber ran screaming into his house. With the Reverend preaching out of town, Gubber’s daddy had to drive Ephram, Celia and Gubber the forty-three miles to the Leesville County Hospital, the only medical facility in a hundred miles with a Colored wing. He lost so much blood on the way the intern said it was a miracle he was still living. Apparently the persimmon seed had punctured the “lower dorsal artery” and Ephram could have easily bled to death. They took a special pair of tweezers and, with great pain, retrieved the seed. The inside of Ephram’s left nostril needed twelve stitches. He remained in the hospital for one night, until word got through to the Reverend, after which he promptly yanked Ephram out of the hospital bed so that he could convalesce at home.
One year later, in the summer of 1941, the boys had seen Sarah Geoffrey’s visiting cousin Lily take off her bra for Percy Rankin in the Geoffreys’ blue barn. Percy had told them to hide up there and for 5 cents each, he’d show them what big titties looked like. Gubber had been thirteen and Ephram twelve and they had stopped moving, even to breathe, as the lipsticked girl slipped off her blouse and unbuttoned her bra. It wasn’t the way Percy squeezed her breasts or the way she laid down on fresh sweet hay with her panties around her ankles that Ephram remembered most, or the way Percy moved over her and she pushed up to meet him. It was the way her breasts fell out of her bra, the way they spilled like sugar cookie dough onto the flat of her stomach.
He and Gubber snuck into the same dry barn early Sunday mornings before Gubber attended the Piggly Service. There, as dust floated in slatted sunbeams, the boys would “play Lily,” they called it. Gubber laying carefully on the same golden hay, Ephram over him, hands running the length of Gubber’s body. They kissed, Ephram’s full lips to Gubber’s warm mouth. Discovering the use and need of strength in pleasure.
That was the year, the moment in Ephram’s young life, when he’d felt a tickling desire, a wish for the things that other men hold dear, that called forth secret winks of approval on Saturday nights. He had wished for a straight-haired, light-skinned woman to love him. He had wished for height and a loud, echoing voice. A mist green Lincoln Continental Cabriolet. He wished for Sarah Geoffrey to giggle high and sweet at him like she did with Percy’s brother Charles. For friends to crowd about him and reel out their laughter over a pint of whiskey and a smoke.
But even then there were things more dear to him, and their dearness made him different. He loved the smell of honeysuckle, so much he’d wear it in his ear when he slept at night. He’d watch a spider weaving its web for hours at a time. He loved the way Gubber kind of gurgled when he laughed. He enjoyed lying on his back with his friend in the evening and painting big dreams against the starry sky. Moving up north. Joining the merchant marines and sailing to Alaska. Playing baseball in the Negro Leagues.
None of which had set well with Ephram’s father, the Reverend Jennings, who followed his son to that barn loft one early Saturday morning, and after the shock of seeing the two boys kissing on the hay, beat Ephram to within an inch of his life. He busted his lip, cracked two ribs and sent his last two baby teeth, the right upper canine and the molar beside it, down his gullet.
Ephram had taken it in silence and shame, accepting each kick and punch with only enough shielding to save his father from a jail cell or worse. Gubber had heroically remained until the Reverend snarled that he would kill them both if he didn’t “GET!” The Reverend Jennings had dragged Ephram home and thrown him on the hall rug for Celia to tend to. “No hospital this time” was all he said. In fact that was all the Reverend would ever say on the subject. He also never looked directly at his son again.
One year later the Reverend found a small parish in Farrsville where the minister was ailing and he lived in and preached there three weeks out of four. Although Reverend Jennings had strictly forbidden it, Ephram snuck into the woods and met up with his friend Gubber most days. It was autumn, hot yet morning cool. They were heading to Marion Lake for a dip. It had been so hot of late that they’d planned to swim in the cool water until supper, so they’d run through the woods, trees making stepping-stones of sunlight ahead of them on their path. They’d leapt from sun patch to sun patch, laughing if they touched shadows, when Ephram felt a sudden shade across his body. He looked up and saw the Reverend standing high above him. He threw his hands up to block a blow. A flash of sun stole off his daddy’s face, the Reverend so high, mouth so wide that Ephram lowered his hands, opened his mouth to say what he was doing there. Then he saw the rope. Then saw his daddy turn in the air. Gubber peed down his leg. A cloud passed in front of the sun. There was blood on the floor of leaves beneath his daddy’s feet. One of his shoes was flung off way over there. His bare sock had a hole. All turning two feet above the earth. The sound of Gubber crying thick snot and water. The way his daddy’s head was like a crooked balloon, lips screaming, eyes dead but wide and asking Ephram something so he heard, “What, Daddy?” croak out of his throat. There wasn’t a sound of water or frog or bird; death had drawn her chalk circle here and not a thing could breathe. Black flies covered his daddy’s mouth like a blanket until Ephram saw the severed thing stuffed there.
Ephram wished he were a dog. Somebody’s good dog with a mighty growl and bark. If he were, he would snarl and burrow his nose into the dirt, howl into the earth until it trembled on its axis. But he was only a boy so he buried that scream like an ax in his gut, where it remained to this day.
From far away Ephram felt Gubber’s hands pulling, then hitting, then screaming something, then running. Then silence and him and his daddy staring into the holes of each other’s eyes until another scream, this time it sounded like a sow at butcher time, then it was only Celia wailing, and more hands pulling at him. Hands finally strong enough to pull his body away, but not the rest of him.
They laid his daddy to rest at the Piggly Service. The Rankins’ cousin presided. By the time Ephram turned fifteen, he and Gubber were barely speaking to one another. Ephram watched Gubber swell and grow and strain against the fence of clothing, only to build a bigger fence, only to strain, again and again. Gubber wouldn’t look at Ephram if they passed in school or at P & K, and worse, when circumstance threw them together, Ephram became the perfect foil for Gubber, a soft, weakened thing to point out when collective fangs were bared. The fact that he accomplished this with a chain of rebukes and thick jokes, and that those actions had done more harm to Gubber Samuels than himself, was not lost on Ephram. He’d watched Gubber swallow his kindness and shit it out until all that remained was the waste of a good man.
GUBBER BREATHED in the last of his cigarette and crushed it with his boots. He rose and pointed himself west, towards the Samuels’s farm.
He spat out, “Watch your ass,” then walked down the red road. Ephram sat and watched Gubber’s back until it disappeared over the rise between a pair of pines.
Ephram lifted himself from the stump. His bones felt cold and ached just a bit at the joints. Celia would be rising right about now, drawing the water for his bath, then stopping herself. He felt a sudden longing for her grits and eggs made just how he liked them. For her coffee with a pinch of chicory and the psalm they would choose to read aloud every Sunday evening after dinner. They’d missed 124 last evening, which was one of his favorites. The road seemed to nudge him homeward. He took a step. Then two. Then he was walking, just to see if she was making out all right. Maybe he would knock on the door to say hello, or perhaps sit down over breakfast and talk it out with her.
A smattering of pine nuts rained down to his left. Ephram turned and saw the Bell graveyard, over the ris
e. And just that quick he knew that if he kept walking that’s where his feet were carrying him. Into that grave of a house, that death of a life. Ephram saw his body cold and still, laid out on Celia’s kitchen table waiting for the undertaker from Jasper to tote him off. He looked much as he did now, a fringe more gray along his temples. Then the picture was gone and he was left with the morning. She had unfurled herself fully and was waving her bright flag across the sky. He turned himself around and walked into Ruby’s door.
Outside in a pine, just above a row of headstones, an old crow gnawed on a pine nut. She was the only creature to see the red powder, rife with ill intent, spread across the entrance of the Bell home. She was the only living being to see Ephram unwittingly step squarely into it and track it like evil into Ruby’s house.
Chapter 16
Monday morning broke through, rubbing Sunday out of its eyes. All across town, coffee had been brewed and cups emptied. The crusts of toast and hardened grits had already been scraped into slop jars. By 9:00 A.M. Ephram Jennings’s sin had already been stirred, baked and left to cool, its scent filling the air of Liberty.
The In-His-Name Holiness Church was bustling in preparation for the one o’clock service. Pastor Joshua was at his desk writing the eulogy, trying to avoid as many R, M and T words as possible, as they played the devil with his nearly conquered habit of stuttering. He wondered if Ephram Jennings would show his face today after the disgrace he’d laid upon Mother Celia. It wasn’t just that he had taken up with another woman, because that was bound to happen in the life of a man given the temptation that surrounded him daily; it was that he had walked into a living room in hell and made himself at home. He was grateful Mother Celia had calmed the crowd, else they might have chased her out of town, like they did Sister Thelma after she took up with Supra Rankin’s husband—and she was a churchgoing woman. Lord knows, he wondered, what they would do to a heathen. The Pastor looked at his paper and thought of how he could weave in Proverbs 29:3 and Matthew 15:22, but doubted that the Rankins would appreciate that many references to harlots and demonic possession during Junie’s eulogy.
RUBY AWAKENED in a warm bed, sheets clean beneath and above her. Ephram was moving about her home so she watched him, in his undershirt, bringing in wood, lighting a steady fire in the stove. Ruby had only seen Ephram in ill-fitting shirts and suits. Now, in the morning light, his body was carved like hard oak—fine sanded, buffed, stained dark and polished. A watercolor tin of browns. She wondered what Billy would say if he saw her here in bed with this man. What would Mrs. Gladdington say if she saw Ephram? Met him, say, on Broadway and Fifty-third? Would she inadvertently try to put a coin into a paper cup filled with cola he’d just gotten from a hot dog vendor? What if Ruby stopped her, introduced them? Mrs. Gladdington could whip a word. Cut an object, a verb and a preposition, a beaker of adverbs, with the delicacy and skill of a cruel scientist. How easy would it be to wound this man, without him ever knowing that he had been hit?
Or what would any of the quick, darting people she had met, what would they say? The liberal world, the brave outsiders, and the wealthy philanthropists. So different, yet all could be depended upon for one common hypocritical judgment against this singular Black man. What disdain would tumble from their collective eyes, their taut, stretched lips?
The disapproval of class and race. If Ephram were a beleaguered member of the abject, illiterate poor, a recipient of their charitable largesse, flown in and trotted out at a five-hundred-dollar-a-plate banquet in their own honor—if he were in a suit purchased by them for the occasion, they would sit and chat and pose for snapshots in Vanity Fair and Page Six and pretend to be the type of people who didn’t care about such things. But bring him to an upper East Sixties party as your guest and the socialite sea would part, leaving him alone with his canapés. Good? Hardly enough. Honest? Utterly boring. An aging East Texas Black man with slow speech and Sunday school clothes was beyond unthinkable.
Yet, there he was, making her a cup of coffee, a nervous start in his movements. She saw the nicks and scars that littered his body like twigs, little badges from a war he had not only survived, but won. Tall, proud, honest, brave. And when his friend had come to call him away, he had chosen to stay. Ruby’s heart became soft like sweet potato pie and she couldn’t wait to press against the man.
Close to eleven-thirty, walking up the narrow road to Bell land, came a migration of men, all dressed in their navy and black suits, nails and underwear clean. They smelled of Lifebuoy soap and Old Spice, except Chauncy, who led the pack, dabbed and splashed in Paco Rabanne, a gift from one of his lady friends in Galveston. Gubber trailed behind, head bowed, carrying a travel bag containing Ephram’s suit, shirt and tie. He had thought to say no, but he wasn’t a man likely to go against a strong woman, much less the whole of a town. Celia had given him Ephram’s belongings with the charge of delivering a message. It was not one he relished. Not even a little.
BY THE time the men reached Bell land, Ephram had already tracked the red powder all over Ruby’s home—upon her fallen hair as he was sweeping it into a brown paper sack. He did not notice her watching eyes any more than the fact that he had tracked that same powder under her porch, where he hid the sack full of cotton candy hair until he had time to burn it, just as Celia had taught him to do his whole life to protect against conjure. Then he’d unknowingly spread specks of the powder all about the kitchen and the bedroom. His belly had already wrenched and cramped and sent him running to Ruby’s small toilet, where he rocked back and forth, grinding the red silt into the floorboards.
He did not know why he was suddenly aching and tired, not just his soles and the length of his feet, but his ankles and calves as well.
After he had shaved, brushed and washed himself off as best he could with the help of items purchased at P & K and a shallow small basin, the dull, exhausting pain seeped into his bones, making him have to sit down on the bed. When the malady reached his stomach again, sweat erupted in his temples and he almost doubled over. It was more than the usual pain; there was also a spreading sickly fear. It seemed to be pumping from his heart, through the smallest of his veins, so that it webbed through every part of him. He was empty and weak when the men arrived.
Chauncy, who didn’t fancy himself an errand boy, sent Gubber to knock on the door.
Ruby opened it, a lift of fear catching in her throat.
Gubber and all of the men stopped dead when they saw her. The caramel glow of her skin, the curl of her black hair, rolling like a frothy river past her shoulder blades. They remembered the girl who had first arrived in Liberty and suddenly felt dull and thick.
Except Chauncy. He glared at Gubber and said, “Go get that boy.”
Gubber, not knowing what else to do, nudged past Ruby and found Ephram sitting on the bed.
He walked to him, leaned over and whispered into his ear, “Celia say if you ain’t at Junie’s funeral she gone send for the Sheriff in Newton to haul Ruby off to Dearing.”
Ephram’s eyes rested upon Ruby across the room fiddling with the crackers and peanut butter. He thought about his mama and the one time Celia took him to see her after their daddy died. The locked gate, and then the next—like a prison except everyone there with a life sentence. They had brought his mother down in a light blue gown with stains that had been washed and dried more than once. Ephram thought about her hair matted and high, the burn marks on her temples, and the needle pricks up and down her purple arms. He saw her eyes, scorched, empty things that only looked at the ground or just past his shoulder. She smelled.
She had seen him for an instant. A look of bittersweet relief visited her face, her shoulders sloped and her graceful neck rose. She tried to lift her hands, which is how Ephram noticed that they were bound. She seemed to notice it in that moment as well. She began to cry and so of course he did as well. An avalanche of shame seemed to turn her head and then her eyes became vacant and she rocked softly until they led her away.
Sh
e had never looked once at Celia.
Ephram took the bag from Gubber without saying a word and changed quickly. A pair of dress shoes was missing, so Ephram kept his on. Ruby walked closer. Gubber stood between both of them.
Chauncy called from outside, “That fool coming?”
Gubber hollered back, “Directly.”
As the two men reached the porch, Ephram turned and looked at Ruby. The pain rose to his chest, making his breath shallow. She seemed as small as a child, standing in bare feet. Questions were written on her face that he did not know how to answer. But his eyes softened and in spite of the fear corded through his belly, he couldn’t help a smile stealing across his face.
