“Just a little bit more,” Matille said. “Just till we get to the part where the baby comes out.”
August went by as if it had only lasted a moment. Then one afternoon Miss Rhoda drove Shelby over in the Buick to say good-bye. He was wearing long pants and had a clean sling on the finger and he had brought Matille the voodoo bone wrapped in tissue paper to keep for him.
“You might need this,” he said, holding it out to her. He looked very grown-up standing by the stairs in his city clothes, and Matille thought that maybe she would marry Shelby when she grew up and be a fine married lady in New Orleans.
Then it was September and the cotton went to the gin and Matille was in the third grade and rode to school on the bus.
One afternoon she was standing by the driver while the bus clattered across the bridge and came to a halt by the store. It was a cool day. A breeze was blowing from the northeast and the cypress trees were turning a dusty red and the wild persimmons and muscadines were making.
Matille felt the trouble before she even got off the bus. The trouble reached out and touched her before she even saw the ladies standing on the porch in their dark dresses. It fell across her shoulders like a cloak. It was as if she had touched a strand of a web and felt the whole thing tremble and knew herself to be caught forever in its trembling.
They found out, she thought. Shelby told them. Now they’ll kill me. Now they’ll beat me like they did Guy.
She looked down the gravel road to the house, down the long line of pecan and elm trees and knew that she should turn and go back the other way, should run from this trouble, but something made her keep on moving toward the house. I’ll say he lied, she thought. I’ll say I didn’t do it. I’ll say he made it up. Everyone knows what a liar Shelby is.
Then her mother and grandmother and Miss Babbie came down off the porch and took her into the parlor and sat beside her on the sofa. And Miss Hannie and Miss Nell Grace and Overflow and Baby Doll stood around her in a circle and told her the terrible news.
“Shelby is dead, Matille,” her grandmother said, and the words slid over her like water falling on stones.
Shelby had gone to the hospital to have his finger fixed and he had lain down on the table and put the gas mask over his face and the man who ran the machine made a mistake and Shelby had gone to sleep and nothing could wake him up, not all the screams or shots or slaps in the face or prayers or remorse in the world could wake him. And that was the Lord’s will, blessed be the name of the Lord, Amen.
Later the ladies went into the kitchen to make a cold supper for anyone who felt like eating and Matille walked down to the bayou and stood for a long time staring down into the water, feeling strangely elated, as though this were some wonderful joke Shelby had dreamed up.
She stared down into the tree roots, deep down into the muddy water, down to the place where Shelby’s pearl waited, grew and moved inside the soft watery flesh of its mother, luminous and perfect and alive, as cold as the moon in the winter sky.
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams Page 18
