The Arms of God: A Novel

by Lynne Hinton

  “Hmm.” Olivia was busy pressing pine needles into borders to separate the rooms in the square of land they decided to make into a playhouse.

  “Who you reckon hit him?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want your room in front of the kitchen or behind?”

  “Behind, I guess. He fights a lot, don’t he?” Tree was sweeping the side area with a pine branch thick with green straw attached to the end. She remembered how swiftly and deliberately he had thrown the rock at his sister just a couple of years earlier.

  “It means you’ll be off by yourself since my room is beside the sitting room.” Olivia still had no response regarding Roy; and Tree was having difficulty recognizing the closed door.

  She had paid attention long enough to realize that Olivia would not discuss her mother except in very strange terms. Her friend spoke of her like she was an acquaintance; someone who stopped by to sell you night cream or pass along instructions having to do with hurricanes and voter registration.

  She never called her Mother; the thought of which seemed as foreign to Olivia as calling her Daddy or Uncle. There was no apparent connection between the woman and her daughter other than the way one feels connected to someone who lives in the same town or buys the same kind of fabric. That and the uncanny way they both seemed to have in knowing how to forget or put something aside.

  There was no malice or ill wishing from the young girl; she was merely indifferent, detached in a way that was cool but not cold, clear but not defined. The way Olivia considered the relationship, it was tidy and manageable. And Tree learned to respect the boundaries that were as real in the mind of Olivia as the pine straw edges that kept room from room in the make-believe house. Tree learned this way of understanding the relationship between Olivia and Mattie over time and without too much difficulty; but she had yet to uncover the lines drawn between brother and sister.

  There were other times, Tree remembered, that her neighbor hit his sister—she had seen the marks—threatened his mother—she had heard the yelling. But she did not know the extent of her friend’s fear that began first with denial and finally moved to forgetfulness.

  She did not realize that for Olivia developing this art of forgetting had become a way to protect herself initially from her mother’s lack of mothering and eventually from her brother’s fiery demeanor. She did not know that to his sister, Roy was more than just a nuisance like most older boys, he was trouble. Trouble with a violent streak that began to reach much too frequently in her direction. And Tree did not know that Olivia understood that it was dangerous enough that she had to learn to focus on something else or it would consume her. Envelope her.

  Tree did not know that Olivia pretended she was an only child. To take Roy out of her life. To get rid of the danger. The little girl from next door, who had violence in her history but not in her memory, did not understand that for her neighbor and friend this tactic was not merely fun and fantasy but rather it had become necessary.

  If pushed to remember, Olivia could have told her friend that she had been afraid of Roy since she was a toddler. That even as an infant she felt a harshness from him that pulled her away. She would remember how he always carried her a little too tightly when he moved her from room to room. How there were marks made by his thumbs that left her bruised and tender. The mean and terrible things he would say to her when no one was listening. The smothering feel of the pillow squared in his two hands stretched across her small, white face.

  He was cruel and hurtful and had always been. And now that she was old enough to retreat from his tough callused fists and his long virulent stares, it helped if she believed that she did not know him. Slighted the fear somehow. Lessened the sting of reality.

  She had fought in self-defense only once. If pushed she could remember that too. Biting with great force into an arm that was intended to wrap around her neck but instead got locked between her teeth. Meant to choke her because of something she had said. She couldn’t remember what. She drew blood but she also took a beating when she finally let go. She was rescued by a blow across the boy’s back, hard and low, given by some drunken bedmate of Mattie’s.

  Olivia suffered very sore ribs, more than likely broken, and a crook in what used to be a short, narrow nose. She was bloody and rent and she never tried to defend herself again, knowing that counting on a mother’s lover was like counting on Santa Claus; and that was a luxury that only the very foolish or the very rich could afford. Instead she stayed away from Roy and tried to make him into someone else’s sibling.

  “What you suppose make boys fight?” Tree was still very interested in her neighbor’s injury.

  Olivia was through making the pine straw borders that divided up the house into rooms and was deciding what to build next. “They just boys.”

  She stood up to admire her architecture. She was proud of the straight lines and the spacious living areas she had designed. She loved the thought of her own house, hers and Tree’s, that was sure to be void of violence and drunkenness.

  Here was the house she dreamed of. And there were no chambers for fear or loneliness, no closets to hide in and lock, no doors to stand behind. This house was complete with joy and friendship, built in just as carefully as studs and joist. Walls were light and dressed in photographs of a neat and happy family.

  Corners were innocent and free of crouching children. Floorboards bore no stains of neglect. The kitchen was warm with smells of hospitality and kindness. Bedrooms were filled with a rich silence that spoke of deep and restful sleep. The windows faced the rising and setting sun that reached over mountains of lovely flowers and fields of green and golden earth. Here was the home that freed Olivia from the boarded-up life she tried to live. Here, in a make-believe house that could be shifted by the wind, a house of straw and wishes, here in this place was the longing of her heart.

  “Maybe it’s that stick in their pants.” She walked over to Tree who laughed and fell into the sitting room marked by stones.

  “Well, it could be.” Olivia replaced the marker that had been kicked into the kitchen. “I seen Jerry Hanslow messing with his. Maybe it hurts.” She thought about the consequences of having a twig in her panties and found her idea quite believable.

  “Maybe it rubs against their legs and starts a sore. Maybe that makes them irritable and they pick fights with other boys because seeing them reminds them of the raw spot between their legs.” She knelt down to work, satisfied with her theory on violence in males.

  Tree rounded out the border in the back and drew four squares around a circle. “Do you think that’s what made my daddy hit my mother?” She sat in one of the squares, considering Olivia’s idea. Maybe her friend was right, she thought. Maybe it was just as simple as having an extra body part, a flap of skin that hangs at the meeting of their thighs.

  Olivia stood up and dusted off her hands. “I don’t know.” She paused, remembering the story that E. Saul had told the two girls one evening when Tree had asked if he remembered their father.

  E. Saul had told what he knew quickly and carefully, saying only that Mr. Love was a man of troubled spirits, a man who liked to see children and women cower at his arrival.

  “But what did he look like?” Tree had asked her brother at the time, as if having a picture in her mind, knowing his features, would grant some image to the absent place in her memories.

  “I don’t remember,” E. Saul had said. “And it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  But it did matter, at least to Tree. And she had told this only to her best friend, understanding that for her family a discussion of Mr. Love was then and would always be forbidden.

  Unlike Olivia, who did not seem curious about the man who was her father, Tree found herself searching for the one everyone called Ticker. Not literally, of course. She and Olivia both knew that their fathers were dead. They had heard Mattie tell Ruth that Olivia’s father had drowned in the Mississippi River and early one Sunday morning they had wandered down by the grove of su
nflowers and at the back of the church to see the small gray stone that stood scratched and unleveled in the puddle of weeds. They knew Tree’s father lay inside the earth, face and body decomposing in the dirt.

  And yet, while Olivia seemed to find comfort in her ignorance, acted as if the untold story was a relief, Tree wanted an image, an understanding so she tried to make up the features of her father using the composites of men she watched.

  “I know what he looked like,” Tree said to her friend as they built their make-believe house.

  Olivia stopped what she was doing to listen. She knew that Tree had been trying to find her father a long time.

  “He’s got eyes like Mr. Matthews, you know dark, set deep in his head.”

  Olivia thought about the man who stood at the crossroads near Smoketown every morning, waiting for somebody to give him work. The quick way he winked and then turned in another direction as if he were searching all the time for the right truck to round the corner and come in his direction.

  “He was tall like Bishop Clover, that man who comes every year to preach revival at the church. I think my daddy was built like him, long-armed and hard across his chest.” Tree pulled her legs close to her, thinking how right she was, how right was her picture of her father.

  “I think he had a wide smile with full, steady lips, that he was light-skinned, more like E. Saul than me.”

  Olivia listened, considering her friend’s description, wondering how long she had been breathing life into a dead fallen shadow, how long she had been giving image to the man who apparently had left only deep and narrow cracks in the hearts of those who remembered him, who knew how he really looked.

  “I think he didn’t talk much and that he walked real fast, that he combed his hair flat to one side, a part made deep to the right, that he rolled his tongue on the outside of a pop bottle like Old Man Smith, and that he dipped his chin when he spoke.”

  The little girl stopped. She realized that she could not think of ugliness or of her father’s horrors when she imagined him, that she could not focus on his misgivings even though she knew some of his sins. One that he ran out on her mother and her brother and the other that he always came back expecting more than what was his. And yet, these trespasses did not blight the form she conjured up of the man she never called Daddy.

  “I know everything about him,” she confided to her best friend. “I can hear his voice. I can see his back and his sturdy neck. I can call it all into being, see him like it was really him, waiting on me, coming to find me. I can see it all.” She hesitated. Olivia waited.

  “Except for his hands. No matter how hard I try, I can’t call up a picture of his hands.”

  Olivia noticed the winding path to the front door of the newly constructed home and considered whether to rim it with flowers or pieces of brick. She figured that she could find something in the field or out by the driveway; but she decided not to leave Tree just yet. She sat down and thought about what her best friend was saying.

  How had Tree’s father’s hands looked? she wondered. Were they thick and leathery, unfeeling from the wasted years of clutching thorns and hoe handles? Were his fingers long and cold? His palms, were they smooth? His nails square and short or ragged and dirty? Did he outline the cheek oh so tenderly before he slapped it openhanded? Did he hide his fist down beside his hip, gripping and releasing before he swung it? Were his knuckles darker than the skin above and below? Were his hands big enough to wrap around a woman’s neck with the same ease they wrapped around her waist when he twirled her to fast music or held her to himself during the slow, easy songs? Were they quick and nimble like a doctor’s or clumsy and misdirected?

  Olivia understood that her best friend, who bore no intimate information of violence, who could not recall the feel of fist on cheek or remember a strangling hold around her throat, that a mind like hers, a mind so unspoiled and innocent, would not be able to conjure up evil in the form of a man’s hands. She knew that her best friend had never worn and therefore did not know the markings of a violent man’s most personal weapons. And no matter how long she searched, no matter how often she peeked down the arms of men, white and black, until she understood the consequences of angry hands, until she felt the blows across her face or back, she would not be able to make herself imagine evil in the form of fingers.

  Just then Roy rounded the corner and stomped toward the porch. He leered at his sister who quickly fell out of his way, holding up his hand like he was going to hit her. Roy lowered his fist and stretched open his fingers. Olivia turned quickly toward her friend and in that swift moment before the punch landed Tree yelled.

  The boy turned in her direction, scowled, and walked away. Olivia shook her head and looked back at the path she was building while Tree, not knowing what just happened, thought she heard a rock fall and land somewhere near her heart.

  I’ve got a question

  ’spect I’ll ask the sky

  how many deaths do angels die?

  Miss Nellie was watching out the back window when her young neighbor came behind her with that question. She was enjoying the ease with which two children can build a family. The simplicity of all of life when watched from a window that opened into the pretend world of little girls. Even if one is black and the other is white. She was so caught up in the silliness and the strength of their play that she did not notice that one of the girls had walked up to her kitchen door and had said something. Something about Mrs. Williams. She couldn’t make out the first part of what they child said, but she did hear the question.

  “How come you don’t sing no more, Miss Nellie?” Olivia had come through the door. “Somebody said you used to sing.”

  It was a simple question really. It wouldn’t take a lot of thought to answer her. She didn’t even have to answer. She could just brush her out the door as if she were interrupting some important task. She could have sent her back to her play. She was a child after all; and children didn’t have to be answered.

  Or if she wanted to give her something, she could just say because she was too old. Or too tired. Or just didn’t enjoy it anymore. Anything would work because all those things were true. But they were not the truth. And Miss Nellie understood the difference.

  Even tucked away so far behind her heart that she could actually enjoy the picture of her granddaughter playing with a little white girl, she knew the truth was still alive inside of her.

  Nellie Star Broadnax could always sing. It was more natural than talking for the youngest child of Virginia and John Smith Broadnax. She was born years after the war but in a place in South Carolina where freedom had not been properly introduced. So Nellie Star started out in the fields like all the other black children. Chopping weeds and pulling cotton until Big Missus discovered the tiny girl’s sweet and tender voice. Then she was taken out of the field and into the backyard to sit by the old woman’s window to sing.

  Big Missus was suffering from cancer that tore away the chords of her voice and left her choking on the walls of her throat. The old woman found that the voice of the slave girl calmed her, soothed the tangled ropes that burned and chafed her need for words. So just as old King Saul used the youth and sugar of David to temper the fever of demons, the Big Missus ordered Nellie to sing and soothe the passage of her breath.

  Nellie did not like her new task though it kept her from the painful bend and yank work that the others endured. She loved to sing and liked the cool of the breezes that shifted through branches near her head. But while her parents plowed and picked cotton and her brothers broke horses and chopped wood, Nellie sat on a milking stool under a window singing, hating herself and her privileged gift that left her mouth and spirit dry and her fingers restless.

  Big Missus wanted her available at all hours so Nellie slept in the woodshed near the big house and away from her family and the other slaves. She was set apart, different; and during all those nights when she peeked around toward the quarters and heard the low talk and smelled the l
ate fires, she longed to give away her gift and gradually learned how to be alone.

  Singing was not the only favor Nellie Star had. There was the matter of a knowingness that gave her extra insight. She could predict things like the change of weather and when a bout of trouble was coming and how it was shaped. Virginia believed that her daughter was blessed with an angel and that she must learn how to pay attention because angels did not waste themselves on those who did not hear. And then her mother taught the little girl how to listen, not with her ears, but with the curve of her neck, down along the base of her spine and beyond the nerve endings that spread across her back like a road map.

  She could tilt her head and follow the delicate push of gossamer wings and know the direction of someone’s sorrow. She would close her eyes, touch the breeze with the tips of her fingers, and follow the shift of tomorrow’s pain.

  During the long hours when Big Missus didn’t want singing, Nellie Star learned the codes of a messenger angel that spoke of heaviness and gave hints about how to help others run for freedom they already had but didn’t know.

  The angel would give her a glimpse of certainty on the nights when the water’s tide was low enough for crossing and the regulators were busy at other farms. And when the glimpse became a vision she would begin to sing. Her voice was light and velvet; and as her volume grew those who had been planning to run would know to pad their shoes.

  They would understand just by the teasing tone of the little girl’s song to run toward the mouth of the Savannah River. Here they knew from passing slave talk that it broke through the foothills like an open wound and dropped into the French Broad River that eventually splashed onto the lips of the hard-to-reach mountains. Away from the long rows of cotton. Away from the never-ending tobacco fields. Away from the whip-torn mounds of flesh and the forever rumble of stomachs that didn’t have enough to eat. Here, they believed, since they had heard no contradictions, was where they would find their liberty.