Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Miles of memory have no meaning in an alfalfa field. Ennis tried not to think of the distance between himself and his family. There were several harvests that season. Seemed like quick as they cut it down, it grew right back up. By December he had earned a fair amount, according to one of the ranchers whose wagon he stocked. One evening while burning the field for reseeding, he decided to work through the winter, when heaving was a big problem. Niabi seemed indifferent but she ordered a woman to sew pieces of wool together for a poncho that kept him warm while he dragged the spiked-tooth harrow across frozen fields. Ennis figured he’d cross the state line come summer, but fate tipped him over into Kansas sooner.

  In December 1912 the town on the hill was hit by a flu epidemic. They killed the forest for coffins. Tombstones sprouted down the hill. As the graves crept closer water from decomposed bodies drained over Misae’s land; all the wells were contaminated. Misae told the men to build barrels. They would have to journey for water to irrigate the fields. Two trains of six horses tied head to tail heaved the flatbeds carrying forty barrels each into Wilson County, Kansas. With nearly two hundred dollars in the pouch under his shirt, Ennis thought of leaving, but they had been good to him. Now that he knew the way, he could return. He filled barrels long after the others lined up on the creek bank to sleep. Glad about his prospects, he looked so long into the future he didn’t see the two uniformed men and rifle commanding him to stop. The Osage slept peacefully while the troopers asked for proof of his water rights, yanking the pouch from around his neck. A year’s wages gone. An army poised against him would have made no difference. He was ready to lose his life but the rifle pointed at him jammed. He struggled for it and threw it aside, pummeled the man until he no longer saw the faces of his family passing before him like fast-moving clouds before a storm, until the crack of wood on his lower back brought him to his knees.

  Eight years later, they opened the cell door, and for the second time in his life someone told him he was free.

  Ennis wiped his eyes and dusted the dirt from his legs. In 1911 when he last rode on Little Tunis’s roads, families lived on the strip of land before the prison fence. Gone. Replaced by a timber warehouse. Next to Starkville Masonry, in the lot where his home once stood, he found a brickyard. He pressed on to the little shack Timbo shared with Roena and the twins, trying not to think of all that could happen to a family of women. He left the abandoned shack with chest pains. Many trees later he came to May-Belle’s cabin still standing on the knoll by the river. He pushed the door open to a dead place. He thought for a moment. Nobody should see him in his road-rough condition. He wished he could bathe, run a comb through his hair, before Fanny mistook him for a boo-hag.

  You could tell time by the Texas heat. Early morning in the Brazos River Valley was the kindest since during the night the trees retained their moisture. But by noon hateful humidity amplified the heat. Pecan and red oaks commenced dropping leaves. Ennis recalled from boyhood that families on the move knew they had arrived in Texas when they saw an autumn ground beneath summer sun. Late in the afternoon you felt heavy, heavy all through your bones. Sometimes this was on account of wind so hot it burned the cornstalks. On the back porch, Ennis took off his shirt, rolled it up and tucked it under his head. When he woke from his nap, Fanny would be home.

  Ennis’s head throbbed from the heat, causing him to stammer: “I-I never should’ve left them.”

  Fanny struggled to match the voice she knew with the face of the man before her. When it dawned on her who the bearded giant was, she pulled him in with surprising strength and bolted to the back of the house. “Have mercy on our souls.” She was waving a newspaper, walking swiftly enough for Ennis to see that she had put on weight. Maybe the years brought a touch of senility too. She was handing him a newspaper to read without a plum word about his family. He unfolded the August 30, 1919, issue of Jam on the Vine. His gaze followed her wrinkled black finger as she read: “Ivoe Leila Williams, Founder, Editor, Publisher.” He drew the paper to his chest.

  “Lemon? Ira—”

  They were all together in Kansas City—Missouri not Kansas—and doing fine, Fanny said.

  Hearing about the people he had yearned for over dinner would make the last leg of the journey bearable, Ennis thought, as he watched Fanny prepare for supper. Fanny lit the stove and pulled out a plate of chicken from the icebox. “Got cornbread. I can warm up yesterday’s chicken too, unless you want to eat it cold like I do.”

  In the morning, Fanny packed a little food for his travels, sorry he had come three days before her payday when everything had run out, or had its hand on the doorknob.

  Clutching his copy of Jam, Ennis made his way to the Starkville train depot.

  .

  Arms full of grocery bags, Ona called, “Howdy, honey, howdy.” She could hear Ivoe in the loft and missed her already. In a few hours her newswoman was leaving for Jefferson City. She glanced around the office. The mailings weren’t finished; the billing book lay untouched. From halfway up the stairs, she saw no pots or pans on the stove. Ivoe had not started anything for the night’s festivities, the twins’ fifteenth birthday barbecue. Recognizing the black leather book in Ivoe’s hand, she quickly put down the bags to study the ledger over her shoulder: 2,161 subscriptions, up 450 from the spring.

  A quick kiss to celebrate before warning Ivoe of the train she was about to miss.

  Ivoe grabbed the step stool and reached on the top shelf for the valise. For years she had heard talk about arrests in the Vine district. Missouri maintained the most congested, most wretched penitentiary in the country, but there was much more to the picture. Hearing the trials of Bunchee’s family had decided for her the next big story. The idea to visit the Missouri State Penitentiary grew more compelling when Bunchee’s research turned up staggering information: of the 2,198 inmates more than 1,900 were black men. After reading census data against arrest records, she spent the last few weeks making phone calls to obtain an interview with the warden, a tour of the facilities, and a visit with Bunchee’s cousin, Claude Knox. It was old hat that white men often spent a night at the county jail or served truncated sentences at the reformatory in Boonville for the same offenses that landed a black man in the pen. With a little luck, she hoped to delve deeper into the willful criminalization of black men.

  Ona looked out the window as she filled two glasses with iced tea. “Irabelle’s coming.”

  “Odell with her?”

  “No.”

  “Shit. Least when he’s with her we don’t have to hear so much about him,” Ivoe said, listening for the way the floorboards creaked. Whenever Irabelle walked heavy, she was worried about Plenty.

  “Y’all, I’m fixing to be manless,” Irabelle began, sitting down at the table dejected. “Or tuneless. Odell’s tired of me and my cornfield ditties.”

  “Irabelle!”

  “Well, that’s what he calls them. He said, ‘What kind of woman prefer playing music in a honky-tonk full of men to raising a family?’ He wants me to have a baby and I think I just might give him one.”

  Ivoe rolled her eyes only for Ona to see. She hated the way Irabelle was withdrawing from the world. She performed less, saw fewer friends. Surely a baby would be the stone rolled before her tomb. Life demanded love, lots of it in all kinds of ways. Damn if Irabelle wasn’t giving all of hers to Plenty. Where was she all the times May-Belle talked about having some love to keep?

  “You give him a baby, you’re surely giving up your music then.”

  “I don’t aim to forever, just while the baby needs me. Maybe then I won’t be so lonely.”

  Ona sucked her teeth. “Ivoe, where did y’all get her from? Whose child is she? She didn’t get no better sense than this foolishness she talking?”

  “I didn’t get nothing. Ivoe got all Momma’s hopes. Seem like I got her regrets, or somebody’s.”

  “Well, not Papa’s.”
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  “We was two peas in a pod, wasn’t we?”

  “And wasn’t room enough in the pod for Timbo, Momma, and me. I never could figure out how you fit that big ole man around your pinky.”

  Over the years, Irabelle’s pride from knowing Papa had loved her too much had turned to regret. Now, because Plenty had taught her, she knew that love was a balancing act. Too much of it was impossible to bear up under. If it was too heavy or too sweet or too anything, in the end love turned people in the wrong direction. It had turned her father and where had he winded up? She would try her best not to let it turn Plenty.

  “How you so lonely when you got Plenty?”

  Ona looked at Ivoe. Surely she knew her sister talked so much about Odell because she had so little of him.

  “Y’all know how he is. He got some funny ways. Some people . . . some people don’t want you too close. If you get close, they leave. And some just like leaving.”

  She was about to tell them the reasons didn’t matter—a man left because he loved you or because he couldn’t stand you. If not for her, maybe Plenty would stick around for the baby. But before she could speak Momma appeared on the landing, winded.

  “Let Odell saddle you with children if you want to. Nothing’s lonelier than being left with a child that can’t understand your worry and needs, needs, needs.”

  “Y’all talking just like y’all ain’t never loved and hated to lose.”

  “Father up in heaven. Honey, what exactly would you be losing? Long as I’ve known Odell he’s never said nothing sweet about you. Don’t wanna take you nowhere unless it’s the bedroom. If you just wanna take care of somebody who’ll tell you what you want to hear, the street is full of them. What’s so special about him?”

  Ivoe sat her glass down like a judge lands his gavel. “I would’ve got tired of Odell shitting on me—excuse me, Momma—then turning around saying I smell bad a long time ago. Listen, y’all, I got a train to catch.” She threw a kiss to her mother and sister and squeezed Ona tightly.

  “They must be fighting again,” Lemon said. “I’m surprised to see you around here before the food ready.”

  “She might as well be with him—she always waiting on him to come around,” Ivoe hollered from downstairs before she closed the door behind her.

  “What if I am waiting? Love’s a train. It don’t all the time run on smooth tracks either. Sometimes it travels through rough land. But it’ll carry you long as you stay with it.”

  Lemon chuckled. “Then, too, Irabelle, every train’s not Glory-bound. It’s a lot of things to love in life but a lie ain’t one of them. You don’t love Odell. You love a lie. Now, your father . . . well, that kind of hurt don’t go away. It just don’t. But the kind of hurt you got—the Odell kind—it’ll go away. Hot will cool if greedy will let it.”

  Late in the evening, after Lemon had gone home, Ennis read the window: JAM ON THE VINE, EST. 1918. Bulky iron equipment and shelves of things he had no names for made him think of Ivoe in his work shed as a little girl: the way she listened patiently, curious about what each tool did; how she poked her mouth out before he gave in to letting her do something he did. She wasn’t happy until they went home covered in black dust from where she’d swept around the forge. At the sound of laughter round and loud like his boy’s, his heart raced. What if they wanted no part of him? Too many years. How could they still need him? Tired like he was, holding on to courage didn’t come easy as he reached out to knock on the door. After a few minutes he saw a woman through the window coming down the staircase.

  Irabelle took her time to the door, hoping it was Plenty. Never mind she and everybody else had just put the badmouth on him, a walk home together would be romantic.

  “Who are you?”

  Even in daylight it would have taken a few seconds to recognize the man in front of her. His hair had turned a yellow gray and the sprouting tufts along the sides of his face were salt and pepper. Nearly all the light had gone out from his eyes. The picture of Papa in her mind put her off the heart’s answer, until a low deep rumble called her name like a question, causing her to recoil as from a knife. Her body shook as the truth wound its way through her. Ennis took her in his arms. She felt light-headed; everything in her seemed to pour out in a frail sound so strange it stopped the domino game between Timbo, Roena, and the twins. Ona paused from her knitting and ran to the landing to look.

  “Father up in heaven.”

  For a long time the weight of caring for his mother, sisters, wife, and sons had scared Timothy. How did he shrink away from the things Papa could do effortlessly? You could hear it in his sobbing now, soft and high from the rough squeeze Ennis gave him: understanding and awe. Roena couldn’t bear to watch it.

  Junebug and Pinky took up the dominoes Ennis recognized as his own, letting them clink loudly into the small zinc bucket. Roena wiped down the table and Ona offered Ennis a seat. Before his behind met the chair Irabelle had poured him a glass of iced tea. Roena and Ona scurried around the kitchen, pulling together bits and nibbles of this and that for his plate: a couple barbecue ribs, a heaping tablespoon of potato salad, the syrupy pan drippings of baked beans, the last ear of corn. With the nervous joy surrounding him, Ennis could not have eaten more. Timbo watched him take the first bite of the rib. “Not too bad, huh? Your grandsons know a thing or two about barbecue.” Ennis wiped his mouth and said, “They got it honest,” which made everybody grin. Pinky and Junebug had never seen anyone eat corn on the cob like their grandfather, who pinched the butt of the husk, gave it a strong twist, then pulled off the roasted leaves and every strand of silk in one fell swoop. He chewed slowly, listening as Ona explained why Ivoe had gone to Jefferson City. Timbo talked about the challenges of being a head foreman. Irabelle showed him the clarinet she played with the Three Deuces Trio, the piece of him she had refused to let go. It was after midnight when Ennis rose. They argued about where Papa would sleep that night until he said, “Surely y’all don’t think I’m spending another night away from Lemon. I don’t care how late it’s getting to be.”

  Outside Lemon’s bedroom window, the sky held a strange pewter cast and a full moon. She thought she saw a shadow fall on her tomatoes. Still getting used to the little house on Hickory Street. Three rooms sure made a lot of strange noises, but at least she had a garden. She climbed back into bed, muttering to herself, “For too many years you been seeing that man’s ghost.” Sleep had marched on when she heard rustling outside her window. She put on her robe and left the house. City raccoons loved to meddle with her tomatoes. “Giiiiit,” she hissed, rounding the corner of the house.

  Something large and solid moved in the blackness.

  “Who there? Don’t want no trouble.”

  “I don’t mean you none,” the voice said.

  Ennis stepped into the moonlight, took her in his arms, and commenced a heavy cry. In her body was a longing she could not let out. She pushed against him, drumming her fist against his chest until she broke free. But he pulled her back, even closer. Her head fell against his chest. “Ennis. Ennis. Ennis. Where you been so long? Where you been?” She lifted her eyes, searching for what kind of hell had kept him away from her. His body felt different. Maybe it wasn’t no kind of hell at all that kept him. Maybe somebody had loved him wherever he came from. Or pretended to. Any love that didn’t come from her had to come up short.

  “ . . . Go off and leave me . . . Leave us like that . . . for so long. So long . . . Ennis. Where you come from? Where you go?” She began a silent cry caught by her husband’s chest.

  In her garden he was surrounded by all the fragrances he had missed; scents he knew so well he learned to conjure them when the stench of his own urine and shit stayed too long in the corner of his cell and in his nostrils. In her garden surrounded by the fruits and vegetables he knew to be the spells of her magic, he wanted to tell her that he too had learned a thing about magic. Befo
re, he believed God brought the seasons and the seasons brought the changes. Now he knew that a white man could take the seasons, roll them into one long dark hour just like you rolled a bale of hay, and make that hour stretch out into eight years. A white man could number your days so that must make him God. Powerful enough to put you before a jury in Neodesha, Kansas, where Ennis had nodded yes when asked whether he had taken water without any water rights. Sometimes you have to kill some of your dreams so the one that matters most can live. He wanted to tell Lemon that he stood at his sentencing less than half the man she knew him to be just so they could have this moment.

  Lemon looked at Ennis hard. The lines of his face showed where hope had been torn out of him.

  “You home now, Ennis. You home.”

  .

  Ivoe followed the guard through the courtyard into a two-story gray stone building where he filled out the appropriate papers to gain them access to the administration office. She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass door. The shoes were the oldest pair she owned, a week away from the trash bin. She wore no lipstick or rouge and her hair was wrapped in the dowdiest scarf she and Ona owned. Luckily, the hem of her dress had come undone. She pulled a loose thread to make it worse. She hoped her costume of poverty impressed the warden, whom she was to meet ostensibly for an article on the necessity of incarceration to rehabilitate black criminals. White men, she had learned, found her easier to take when she was less put together and not so articulate.