In the Kingdom of Men

by Kim Barnes

  I remembered my grandmother’s ways, used the last of our flour and lard to bake half a batch of sugar cookies, told my grandfather I was taking them to Sister Woody, an elderly parishioner who lived down the road, and he nodded his approval at my charity. I felt like skipping as I made my way out the door. I had no destination, only a desire to be free. I walked an easy two miles, ate half the cookies, fed the rest to the crows, turned around, and came home happy with the news that Sister Woody’s health was improving.

  I became braver, told bigger lies, and walked the farmland for hours or hid with my book in the neighbor’s barn. In gym class, I let my body have its joy, leaping and sprinting ahead of my classmates. When my teacher suggested I try out for girls’ basketball, I forged a careful note home that said I was helping clean the blackboards after school. I made the team and for the first time felt part of something, like I might be someone’s friend, running up and down the half-court and hollering back and forth like it was a normal thing for a girl to do. I skipped the communal showers, unable to imagine letting myself be seen naked, left my knee-length trunks and sleeveless top in my locker, and ran as fast as I could, hoping to beat my grandfather home. He would sit down to the dinner I made him and never say a word about my wild hair, my ruddy skin, and I believed I had fooled him until the evening he rode into town on the mule and appeared at practice still in his farm clothes, pulled out the worn Bible, and filled the gymnasium with his voice. “ ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God!’ ” He clapped the good book closed, pointed me to the door, and I slunk out, shamed not by my sin but by the looks of pity on the faces of my teammates. Once home, he sent me to my room and sat at the foot of my bed, studying me with intense sadness, as though he might see the workings of my deceitful soul. “I can’t let you burn in hell,” he said, and raised the leather strop. The fierceness of his whipping came up through my bones, rattled like dry seeds in my ears. After, he held me and cried. Maybe that’s why I can forgive him. He only meant to save me.

  Why couldn’t I just obey? Drinking, smoking, dancing, bowling, playing cards, going to movies, wading with the Butler boys down at the creek—all sins. To question my grandfather’s rules and the law of his God was mutiny, any plans to rebel an act of treason. Yet even with the punishment I knew was coming, I’d slide open the sash I’d waxed with paraffin, drop to the ground, and walk to Chester’s Drug, where I would sit at the end of the counter and watch the boys peacock, the girls preen while the jukebox played Elvis, Roy Orbison, the Miracles.

  The only one who paid me any mind those times was Juney Clooney, a white girl too pretty for her own good, the church ladies said, but I envied her grace, the way she tipped back her soda, ponytail hanging down like a plumb bob. She would pour me a glass of her Nehi, something in her smile almost sad. Maybe I was the only one who wasn’t surprised when her place at the counter came up empty, one of the few who knew the truth of what had happened between her and Baby Buckle.

  Buckle was a childlike man, rolled flesh at his neck, rounded shoulders and soft hips, waist cinched by a wide leather belt and a brass buckle the size of a saucer. He worked right there at Chester’s Drug as a delivery boy. Chester and his wife always said that Buckle showed up one Christmas Eve, abandoned as a baby on their doorstep, cold as slab marble, but rumor held he was Chester’s son by Hazel Twig, a young mixed-race woman from our side of town who cleaned the store once a week until she up and disappeared. Because that is what happened when girls got themselves in trouble. They were sent to the home for unwed mothers or simply sent away, anything to erase the family’s shame, absolve the father’s guilt.

  It was Juney’s twin brother, Jules, who came stumbling into the store one day, his shotgun loaded, hollering that he’d gone home for lunch and found Juney crying. She told him that Buckle had come to make a delivery, caught her alone frying gizzards, and dragged her into the pantry. I sat stone still as the other boys piled into their pickups. They found him beneath that big walnut tree at Bowman’s Corner, asleep with his pants at his ankles. They didn’t stop to ask, just noosed him up with his own belt, buckle splitting his mouth like a bit. It wasn’t but a few days later that I came in on Juney’s mother, confessing to my grandfather that it wasn’t Buckle who had raped her daughter but Juney’s own daddy, who told her to blame Buckle or he’d kill her and her mother too. All that Buckle did was pick the wrong tree to do his business behind. But what good would it have done for me to tell, and who would believe me? I had read the stories of courage and conviction, but sometimes the truth seemed worse than the lie. I sat quiet at the counter, kept my secrets to myself.

  What I remember of high school: not the football games and dances I wasn’t allowed to attend, not overnights with the girlfriends I didn’t have, but the romances and mysteries that kept me company. My grandfather demanded from me humility, modesty, and temperance, but when I read Little Women, Gone with the Wind, Murder on the Orient Express, I entered into the realm of everything knowable, anything possible, if only I were smart enough, pretty enough, and brave.

  In my imagination, I had traveled to that place of dark-haired princes and veiled sultanas, knew the thousand and one tales that kept Scheherazade alive, dreamed that I might do the same, weave a web of stories so enthralling that the man I loved would be spared the agony of having to kill me, but if someone had told me that I would soon be living in Arabia, I would have laughed. And no matter the number of romances I read, I never dreamed that someone like Mason McPhee would kiss me—my long skirt, those awful shoes, straw from the henhouse tasseling my socks. But Mason. Highest-scoring point guard, on full-ride scholarship to Oklahoma State, once and former prom king, the pride of Shawnee! Homecoming, the first parade of my life, Mason an honored guest riding high in a convertible Chevrolet, everyone calling his name. Only our hometown astronaut, Gordo Cooper, had a bigger crowd, and he’d orbited the Earth in a spaceship.

  I wore my best wool skirt, rolled it up just a little. If my grandfather had seen me that way, he’d have whipped me into next Sunday. I thought I might look like Rita Hayworth, auburn hair to my waist, loose and undone, and maybe I did. Maybe that’s what Mason saw. “Virginia!” He cupped his hands like a megaphone. “Ginny Mae Mitchell!” I was struck dumb, as though he were the first ever to call my name.

  Here’s the truth of it: watching him smile and wave from that car, I made the decision right then. When he asked me out for a Coke, I thought, This is it, my one chance with a man like Mason McPhee. I waited until my grandfather was asleep and slid open my window, not a creak or scratch to betray me.

  That Coke was the sweetest thing. I couldn’t believe I was there at the soda fountain with Mason, the other boys slapping his shoulder. The girls looked at me like they’d never seen me before. Maybe because I didn’t know what to say, Mason talked and talked. About basketball, all the hours he had practiced in back of his house, a bicycle rim bolted to a pine. How his sharecropper father would come in off the tractor, challenge him to a game of Horse, and they would play past dark, nine games, ten, until Mason’s mother called that she was feeding their dinner to the hogs. Mason always knew he would go to college and was studying prelaw, meant to be the finest public defender to come out of Pottawatomie County, maybe even a judge. He was sure that he could make a difference. He railed against the war in Vietnam and segregation, told me about the marches and protests he attended. “This world right here isn’t real,” he said, and tapped the café table. “You,” he said, resting his hand over mine, “you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. We’ve got to think bigger, do bigger things, like the Reverend King says.”

  I didn’t know the words of famous men, only the verses of the Bible I had been raised on, but I believed everything that Mason told me, as though they were truths I had felt but never knew how to say. All I could do was nod, take in the shock
of light hair fallen across his forehead, those blue, blue eyes, his only flaw a small scar at the right corner of his mouth that folded in like a dimple. He hadn’t seen it coming, pitched by the boy picking rocks, the two of them sweating for ten cents an hour, clearing the Cooks’ field free of stones. Even that wound seemed worthy, a testament to work and withstanding.

  “I should get you on home,” he said. He held my eyes for a moment, and when I didn’t look away, he brought my palm to his lips. And then it was easy enough to slide into his old sprung sedan, ride that road out of town, find that little stand of post oak. He ran his hand beneath my hair. “You smell just like ripe wheat,” he said, “just like honey from the hive.”

  I should say I tried to stop him, but what reason would I have now to lie? Another few days and he would be gone back to the city, another world, but after we finished, he held me close like he feared I might slip away. When he lit a cigarette, I lifted my face.

  “Can I have one?” It was the first thing I had asked of him, as though opening my body had loosened my tongue.

  “I bet you don’t even know how,” he said.

  I moved my hand to his, eased the cigarette from his fingers, and he crooked a smile. “You’re damned determined, aren’t you?”

  Maybe just damned, I thought, but not a single cell of my body believed it was true.

  After I told him to, he dropped me at Bowman’s Corner, and I walked the flat mile back home. I wanted to keep the night inside me a little while longer. All those stars. That piece of moon. “You only think you know what you want,” my grandfather once said to me, but this time, I was sure.

  By Christmas, I couldn’t lie anymore—my grandfather had been watching my rags. He wasn’t crying when he whipped me but making sounds like he was dying. I couldn’t help but curl up, even though some part of me wanted to give him my belly, let him beat the baby right out of me. Maybe he was more afraid than I was, and the truth is, I wasn’t afraid at all. I believed that I was done being afraid.

  That night, I waited until he fell asleep in his cot, the strop still coiling his fist like a copperhead, before pulling on my mother’s old riding boots, soft and slick in the soles, and sliding out of my window. When my feet hit the ground, I was running, cutting straight across those open fields, leaping the ditches, falling over stones. By the time I reached Chester’s Drug, my knees were bleeding, my palms burning raw. I called from the pay phone at the corner, nickels dropping down, heard Christmas carols, men’s laughter in the background. When I told Mason, he didn’t even hesitate, just said he would do right by me. It was an honorable thing. I knew it then and I know it now. A right and honorable thing.

  He drove in from Stillwater, picked me up at the corner, and took me to Oklahoma City, where we lied about my age to the justice of the peace. A thin band from the pawnshop, a little bit of gold, and I was Mrs. Mason McPhee. There was nothing my grandfather could do but what he did—he shunned me, wouldn’t even speak my name.

  Mason’s parents offered that I could live with them while he went back to college, but he said he wanted to do this on his own, it was his responsibility, and I knew he meant me. He told his coach he’d lay out for a while, get a job and save up, return in the fall, but when a slicker came up from Texas, recruiting for Zapata Off-Shore, fanning money and mouthing promises of plenty, Mason didn’t hesitate, signed on as a roughneck, and said we were headed to Houston. I wish now I had talked whatever sense I had left, insisted that he go back to school, but I believed that, as a wife, I had only two choices: follow his lead, or leave.

  We packed up everything we owned, made the trip in a day, and found a little rental behind Basta’s Funeral Parlor, peach-colored stucco with a redbud out front. I kept the back curtains closed against the hearse pulling away, the parade of cars with their lights on. But the parking lot had a basketball hoop, the mortician watered the lawn green, and the tulip trees lining the lane filled the evening air with their sweet perfume. Sometimes I wish we had stayed right there, making our way dollar by dollar, but Mason never let the grass grow under his feet. The only way he knew how to move was up.

  Those first weeks, he’d come home from the oil rig black as a coal miner, all the shininess of his life gone. We lived on stew meat, sacks of beans, thought an onion was a special thing. I’d get up each morning, pull on his old jeans and long-tailed shirt, sweep the floor, sew a little, then fry spuds for dinner just like my mother did, the baby in me heavy and kicking, already wanting out. Mason, he’d eat the food right down to the plate, tell me how good it was, then go to bed, asleep before his head hit the pillow. I’d start scrubbing his clothes because they were the only ones he had, hang them by the stove to dry, iron them in the morning. Only when I tucked into our single bed, borax still burning my knuckles, did he wake, just long enough to kiss my neck, make love in that tired, sweet way, and then we would sleep.

  Mason believed in giving his all no matter what, never complained, just did his job better than the next guy, kept the muscle moving the metal that pumped the oil that kept the profit and every man’s paycheck coming in. Some of the drillers were Okies like us, others Creoles trucked in off the bayous, Czechs just off the boat—to Mason, all the same. I’d never known a white man to step aside for a black, but that’s what Mason did. Like me, he sometimes forgot to even think of color, and I loved him more for it, but I knew what some of the other men were thinking as they watched him, gauging his sympathies, their mouths twisting with the names they called him behind his back. If I had first been drawn to the vision of him sitting high in that convertible Chevrolet, what I came to cherish was his fairness, his compassion and belief that he could change things, make the world a better place, so different from what I had been taught: that man had fallen so far, there was no way to pick him up again.

  When a Chickasaw running a cable got sliced clean through and his pregnant widow lay in the dirt at the base of the rig for two days until her family came to carry her away, I wrote her a letter, and Mason sealed in what money we’d saved. “She’s lucky they found him at all. Sometimes there isn’t much left,” he said, and I remembered a woman in Shawnee whose husband had disappeared in the oil patch, vanished without a trace, she told my grandfather, like he’d been caught up in the Rapture. She’d come to our shack for assurance that she hadn’t been left behind, and I watched the two of them kneel in the kitchen, my grandfather’s hands on her shoulders, her lips quivering in prayer. The next day they found her husband, who had fallen through the floor of the platform and been impaled on a rod, thigh to throat. “Just like a scarecrow,” the crew boss said. “Even his hat was still on.” I learned early that people can disappear just like that—the wink of an eye and they’re gone.

  Houston seemed like the center of the world back then, people coming in from all over, derrickhands, engineers, toolpushers, and boilermen—Mason’s friends, every one. Weekends meant cocktail parties, pinochle parties, jamborees at the Bill Mraz Dance Hall, where Mason taught me to polka, my maternity smock billowing as we twirled. I watched the other women smoke their cigarettes, drink whiskey sours, cross their legs, nylons swishing. They belonged to that world that my grandfather had feared would find me. I didn’t know how to talk to them, what to say, but Mason, he fit right in. That smile, quick and easy. Sometimes, when he grew quiet, refilled his whiskey again, I feared he was thinking about the way things might have been if he hadn’t married me but Sally Richardson, his prom queen, blond hair, narrow waist, a daddy who owned the Buick dealership. No man wanted a ruined woman—wasn’t that what I’d been told? Yet there I was, dancing the night away with Mason McPhee, having the time of my life.

  We bought a white bassinet, a pale yellow blanket with satin trim, set up the extra bedroom as a nursery, and I spent my days washing walls, sewing curtains, until all I had to do was sit and wait, even as the near-spring air perked the robins into frenzies and the redbuds swelled fat. When I told Mason I wanted to learn how to drive, have some way to get o
ut when he was gone, he veed his forehead. “Streets are too busy around here,” he said. “I’ll take you to the country one of these days, let you bust around where nothing can get in your way.” I bided my time, beat him out of bed one Saturday before dawn, climbed behind the wheel of his old sedan, and eased it around the block. I thought I could steal those minutes, the sky just beginning to pink, teach myself all that I needed to know, but when Mason stepped out later that morning to find the car bumped up onto the curb, he lit a cigarette, looked at me with one eye squinted shut, but didn’t say a word. He got in, drove away, and I thought he was angry, but he returned an hour later from the used-car lot in a pretty little two-tone Fairlane. “Best to go along with whatever you set your mind to,” he said, grinning as he moved to the passenger seat. “Telling you no is like pouring gas on a fire.”

  I slid behind the wheel, drove twice around the block, and felt right at home, as though I were meant to hit the road a little faster. Mason pointed to the highway, and we headed south, Dean Martin on the radio, past the new domed stadium, so big I couldn’t take it in, and on to where pumpjacks levered the horizon, the ranchland split open and paved into cul-de-sacs, fresh-built houses strung out like charms on a bracelet, NASA families in every one. I checked the rearview, saw the new high-rises, steel beams piercing the haze, and thought of our dead president’s call to put a man on the moon. Even then, some part of me understood we wanted to own it all, up, down, earth to sky.