by Cynthia Bond
Marilyn Daniels disliked the man, but she was raised well and so she welcomed him into her husbandless home. She could see the loosely plastered desperation that hung over the frame of the man, the manners tacked on like pictures to hide the cracks. Worst he was a fly-by-night preacher, a man without a home except the one he wore on his back. And that, noticed the seamstress, was of shoddy cloth and make.
When he left for the evening, with a promise extracted from them to attend the revival the following evening, Marilyn could almost feel him marking her door like a male dog—done all the more easily because her husband’s scent of tobacco and bay rum aftershave had long since faded.
Otha Daniels fell in love that next evening sitting in the third pew. Otha and her parents had always kept a quiet house. Reverend Jennings was a trumpet blasting into the tender space under her ribs. She could not understand why he was only the warm-up act for other, less worthy men. She was vexed by this, but knew that the injustice could be rectified—with her help. In that moment she ripped out the seams of her own dreams and patched them into his.
Her mother brought up ridiculous things like age and money. But when she mentioned Fisk and her daddy’s dream, Otha felt the wind leave her sails for a moment. She had been her father’s daughter and had believed and followed him in all things, but she was seventeen years old now, one month away from eighteen, and from everything she had learned of the world, everywhere she looked, women stopped being their father’s girls when they became a husband’s wife.
That next night the Reverend walked her home. There was not so much talking as they listened to their feet sweep along the sidewalk. They passed other Negro couples holding hands on the street and so he reached out and held her tapered, narrow hand in his. He began to talk about her hands, how long the fingers, how delicately they moved, how it had been one of the first things he had noticed about her. Otha had never thought of her hands as anything but agile tools to make lace and stitch. She felt a kind of magic running through her palms that made them want to dance like butterflies in the air.
They walked in circles, around parks, and dragged their feet long after the sun had fallen out of the sky. When they walked right by the graveyard where her daddy was buried, he’d kissed her so sweetly she melted into the earth. It was then that she had done it, given her daddy’s dream back to him. She had done it with tears of sorrow but also with joy, because this new dream was filling her solar plexus like blown glass, scalding hot and liquid at the same time. So they walked back to the church where Minister Bowing made them man and wife.
Her mother had let out a small scream of agony when Otha told her she had married the Reverend. It was the loudest noise anyone had ever made in the house. Otha held her mother, her dark arms wrapped around the older woman’s neck, wet cheek to wet cheek, both crying in the dim of the evening lamps. She whispered into her mother’s ear that he gave her a reason to breathe in and out and that she would follow him and love him for all of her days.
Marilyn held her daughter. She would be hurt, of that Marilyn was certain. Helpless to protect her, Marilyn felt a wildness in her own chest, like a bird trapped behind a glass door. But when she looked in the girl’s eyes she could see that she was already gone so she gave her words to help her in the dark days:
“Your daddy and me named you Otha. It means ‘wealth.’ You were your daddy’s treasure from the time you were born until he died. He used to say there were rubies buried deep inside of you. Remember, baby, don’t never let a man mine you for your riches. Don’t let him take a pickax to that treasure in your soul. Remember, they can’t get it until you give it to them. They might lie and try to trick you out of it, baby, and they’ll try. They might lay a hand on you, or worse, they might break your spirit, but the only way they can get it is to convince you it’s not yours to start with. To convince you there’s nothing there but a lump of coal.
“Honey, one day I’m going to die, and that’s not all, one day you’ll die too. And between the here and the there, God sets us upon the business of collecting life’s true fortune. I’ve gotten plenty: the way your daddy smiled when I met him; the apple pie your grandmother used to make, with whole cinnamon grated in with the sugar; the maple leaves in the fall and how that always meant your daddy’s fig maple syrup would be on our pancakes. And you. You my big beautiful jewel baby. You my prize. And one day you’ll have a child and that child will be your prize.
“Teach them to see it, teach them by doing. But if you can’t, if you done give your treasure away, if you find it hard to make your way in the dark of your own soul, if you forget who you really are, know that it comes back to you when the lie they give you die. That lie don’t die easy, and sometimes it take you with it. But for all that, your bounty yet waits for you to claim it.
“Remember and it will yet shine. Shine brighter when you let love touch you. Shine brighter when you love yourself. Shine on into heaven when you leave this old world.
“Remember what I say Otha. Remember to lay claim to your inheritance. Will you make that promise to me?”
Otha shook her head, eyes spilling with tears. “I promise Mama,” she whispered.
Then she gave her mother a kiss on her dark cheek and went upstairs to pack her bags. She left that hour. Marilyn watched them drive away—the Reverend had waited in the buckboard, never entering her home again, not even to pick up her daughter’s bags.
He was good to Otha for a month, and the days of that month were full of talk and big dreams and pictures the size of the sky painted with flourish. He told her of the South as they rode on his buckboard to Liberty, gentle breezes full of gardenia, and blue-bonnets littering the sides of hills. He talked about seeing and knowing, how he was a grown man and knew what he wanted, how he wanted to shepherd the lost. He talked about the church he would have one day, and the rainbow glass with angel wings. He said how she was a little bitty thing who he would keep under his wing at least until forever.
The thirty good nights filled Otha with a kind of joy that broke her heart. It was too great a feeling to fit into her temperate body, her delicate spirit, so she had to keep breaking apart to accommodate it, only to glue herself back together each morning. By the time they reached Oklahoma she could no longer recognize herself. But Otha liked this new woman in the looking glass, with tired smiling eyes and world wise lips.
It would be years before he hit her. But in Texarkana, five days from Liberty, he began a covert assault on her judgment. It was little things, like how not to hang linen on the traveling line, what not to wear during Holiness service while he was guest preaching. When they arrived at the Jesus Hearth Church in Dearing and he gave his “Out of the frying pan, into the hands of Jesus” sermon with a 102-degree fever and chills to a decidedly cool congregation, he shamed Otha in front of the congregation by speaking about Northern women with shorn hair who thought the rib was bigger than Adam. By the time they reached Liberty his face was sullen stone that only cracked at night between white sheets.
When her mama got sick a year later, Otha didn’t have the strength to tell her she had been right. She asked for money to visit Marilyn but the Reverend said train tickets didn’t grow on trees. He gave her money for a trip to the funeral four weeks later instead.
The first two children died before they had fully taken root in her womb. Otha had wanted proper graves but the Reverend said that that was blasphemy as they hadn’t come full term and hadn’t been baptized. The next child was Celia and she was the Reverend’s child from the beginning, willed to life by the boom of his voice, smiling at his coos and tickles, crying even as she suckled at Otha’s breast. Then five more lost children until her boy Ephram came in ’29.
By this time the Reverend was hitting her good and proper when, he said, she deserved it. He hated to see her reading and would slap her whenever he caught her at it without first asking if she had finished her chores. He never let her cut her hair, but bristled if she primped in front of the mirror.
When Ephram was five, Grueber’s mill went up in flames. It took three whole months before it was up and running, during which time the collection plates suffered greatly. So much so that Otha had to take a job in Newton making lace at Miss Barbara’s Bridal Necessities. The Reverend had taken her there himself early one Monday morning. He’d said that Paula Renfolk, Miss Barbara’s maid, had told him about the job, but when they got there, Paula seemed surprised to see them, and her husband and Miss Barbara were, oddly, on speaking terms. Even so much as for her to make a donation of fabric and notions to the children of his parish, and for him to follow her up the stairs of the shop to lift the heavy box, and then stay up there for a good twenty-five minutes.
Paula had leaned over and scolded Otha. She told her that she’d best keep her husband satisfied at home or deadly trouble would surely befall him. She’d told her that she’d seen Miss Barbara donate plenty to her husband when the shop first opened. Said no White fella would give her the time of day till she got those new teeth from Dallas. Even after they came in that blue medical box, she’d still made plenty of donations to the Reverend.
When Otha asked her husband about it that evening, he slapped her so hard that blood filled up her mouth. After that, Otha kept her eyes on her work.
Which, truth be told, was not a sacrifice, because, besides her son Ephram, the beauty of lace was her one true love. Her mother had taught her how to move her fingers, how to stretch the wedge of the lacing tat and loop the fine silk thread. Her work was impeccable and soon she developed a reputation. Women from as far away as Pickettville and Beaumont came to Miss Barbara’s because of Otha’s intricate and delicate work there in the small dim room at the back of the shop. Often Ephram sat with her for hour upon hours, watching her work. Although the Reverend expressly forbid it, she silently taught him, stitching slowly when his eyes rested on her work, tilting the pattern downward if he leaned towards her. In this way they shared many evenings before getting on the Red Bus to Liberty.
The Reverend had taken to slipping out most nights. Otha assumed it was to see another woman—perhaps even, if Paula had been right, Miss Barbara, for which he surely would be killed. He had been betraying Otha for years with sisters of his own flock. She could always tell who by the way their eyes leapt and danced when the Reverend placed a hand on their arms or shoulders, by the sly cut of their smiles when they greeted her each Sunday. Otha expected and often found telltale signs on his person: a soiled handkerchief, the pungent scent of a woman, a stray pressed hair curling about a button or in his undergarments.
But Otha started finding other, more disturbing articles. She found a tiny Black doll with a pin through its neck in his breast pocket one evening. One night she found a small red velvet pouch filled with a smell so foul she almost regurgitated, another time some type of fang wrapped in sinew. She would come across bits of garlic tied to doorposts and small covered holes in her vegetable patch. When she dug into the earth with frightened hands she would always find a strange assortment of bones and nail clippings. But the last item she had found sent her into the piney woods in secret pursuit of her husband. It was the evening before Easter 1937. Ephram was only eight.
That afternoon, Otha had been going through the laundry basket. She had been unable to locate her good bottom sheet. The second best had been on the bed two days now and the Reverend was a stickler when it came to cleanliness, especially on a Sunday. She had searched high and low. It was not in the washroom, not on the bedroom shelves. The thing became a matter of pride for her, she simply could not have lost her single good bottom sheet. So she began looking in unusual places. She searched through the storm cellar, behind fig and peach preserves. Rising uneasiness caused her to ransack the attic and the smokehouse. Finally, balled in a gap of earth under the rotting wall of the unused outhouse, she found it. It was stiff with mud and something gooey dried hard like glue. It was not until Otha brought the sheet to her nose and smelled the low musk salt did she know it was blood. A chill circled her throat and grabbed her diaphragm. She smelled it again and knew that something had been killed there. She lay on the ground until her heart filled her brain with reason. Her hands were moving like air as she lay on the earth and it took her a moment to notice them. When she did she calmed them against her breast. She had been lacing. The movements always brought comfort. She stuffed the sheet back under the outhouse and went to find her children.
Celia, fourteen, was baking for her father, chocolate layer cake, his favorite. Celia was not a particularly inspired cook but she had an iron-hard will and determination to learn. Celia was fine. Then she went in search of Ephram. Her husband hated the boy with a deep, unruly passion. Otha feared the reason, but pushed it out of her head as quickly as it had come. She hunted in all of Ephram’s favorite spots until she found him feeding fish at Marion Lake. She tried to quiet her heart at the sight of him, little legs curled under him, his breath so smooth and steady. But a bubble of fear stole up from her chest and she could not stop herself from crying when he turned to look at her. A small cloud of worry knitted across his face so she reached out and smoothed it down. She sat beside him and stared out at the water.
“You all right, Mama?” her son asked.
She ran her hand over his small square head. His father had kept his hair clipped so close to the scalp that it felt a bit like a new peach. “There’s not even enough here for a part.”
She watched her son smile. It was an old joke but he kept a fresh grin for whenever she told it. Dragonflies darted by, their wings catching rainbows. They sat so quietly that they heard the lean of the grass and the nuzzling pines. They were quiet people, always had been. He was her stock, had her daddy’s brow and her mother’s grace. There was nothing of the Reverend in him, which made it easy to pull him near. She wanted to tell him about wolves in the world and a gut-wrenching kind of danger. Otha could feel it rushing past the trees towards her. Her heart sped in her chest. Her son’s eyes were so large and dark, his lashes so thick. He peered up at her and she leaned down and kissed him where the part should have been.
She didn’t know that her fingers were moving until Ephram looked down at them.
Their eyes met for a moment. She smiled and shrugged. Then he mashed his face into her, his spindly arms little spider things reaching to hold tighter. So she gathered him up in her lap like she had when he was a bitty thing, not the big boy he was now, and the two watched as evening crept in like a thief and stole the rest of day.
That night after the house was asleep the Reverend slipped out, but not before walking into his son’s room. Otha was behind him, feet padding softly on the floor. She peeked in and watched her husband leaning low over the sleeping boy, rumbling strange words while his hands swept the air over Ephram’s body. He left a red velvet pouch over the head of her son’s bed. She watched as he went to the trash receptacle, opened his handkerchief and gathered tiny crescents of the boy’s fingernails he had clipped after dinner. Then he started out. Otha ran like silent lightning and hid behind the closet door. He walked right by her and out of the house. She walked into Ephram’s room and ripped the velvet bag from his headboard. Her boy kept sleeping. She sped in bare feet out into the night. She heard a twig break in the distance and she followed. The moon naked and whole above as she tracked noises so quiet that they registered in her unconscious. In this way she walked in her white gown, her hand tight about the red velvet. Where was he taking her boy’s nails? Where? She felt the same danger rushing towards her like water. Like a flood rising as she crept after her husband. At one point he stopped and looked back. She ducked down and stopped breathing, then he was off again towards Marion Lake. She saw a glow in the distant clearing, a light flaring in the black thicket woods. Her husband was walking towards it with clippings from her son, and so she followed. As she got closer she could see the trees around it, some of the branches seemed to wave and move, until Otha got close enough to see that they were the raised arms of men, staring into the flame
s. They were waiting for something.
Otha crept closer, as quiet as the air. A wide pine ahead would hide her. She stopped and dropped to her belly, lifted by her elbows so she could see.
