Freshwater Road

by Denise Nicholas

  "More thunderstorms through here than anywhere. The lightning fires burn those trees. They call'em stags' heads." Matt grabbed Celeste's suitcase and walked into the house. He came back for the boxes of children's books. Celeste imagined the burned trees as escapees from some miserable past who hadn't made it out. They were caught in the moment of agony as if they'd reached their scorched hands up to a God who'd turned his back on them. She went inside.

  Mrs. Owens met Celeste on the screened porch, and Celeste noticed her charcoal black eyes had a blue ring around the iris. Celeste followed her inside, noting too the lone rocking chair on the porch. She was directed to put her book-bag in a small bedroom where her suitcase and the children's books already sat just beyond the curtain that took the place of a door. There was a small sitting room directly across a hall of sorts from the bedroom.

  In the kitchen, Celeste joined Matt at the small table dressed with a checkered cloth. She pushed her memories of home and Momma Bessie's china and crystal out of her mind as Mrs. Owens set down a plate of food then took the seat between them, closest to the hot gas stove. She grabbed their hands and prayed over the food. Beyond the back door and some yards from the house, that cool-looking patch of woods beckoned. Great, grand trees with delicate branches and long, long needles. They were the only thing she'd seen that reminded her of Michigan, though these pines weren't shaped like Christmas trees. A mysterious wood. How far back did it go? Was there another road beyond those trees, another cleared stretch of sandy soil with shanty houses up and down?

  As hungry as she was, the hot biscuits oozing butter, pork-laced greens, and smothered chicken gave Celeste pause. Even Momma Bessie lightened her cooking in the heat of summer. But this was a special meal for Mrs. Owens, and she should eat no matter how it made her feel. She drank the iced tea and ate the food, staring out the back way and praying silently for a breeze. There was a wide work counter on the rear porch with two tin tubs, one inside the other, beside a big box of Tide and a jug of bleach. A water pump. Off the kitchen, another floral curtain marked a door. It had to be this woman's bedroom.

  "They're probably going to dredge the rivers up around Meridian if they don't find 'em soon." Matt chewed and drank his iced tea in long gulping swallows. Periodically he took breaks from shoveling food into his mouth and pressed a knot of towel-wrapped ice cubes to his head. "Those boys went missing over by Philadelphia." Celeste thought again of Matt's beating on the road. Only the grace of God protected them from some unknown fate. There was no other help on that highway.

  "They start looking in all those rivers and creeks, they gon find plenty people supposing to have left here for someplace else and never heard from again." Mrs. Owens ate sparingly. Dribbles of sweat sprouted on her upper lip. "Nobody speaks it, but they all know."

  "They've already found some remains. There was a photo in the Jackson paper of the police throwing some bones in an unmarked grave." Celeste's words hung over the table like a dead calm on the ocean. She wiped her mouth on the thin paper napkin, wishing she'd kept her bone story to herself. Bones all over Mississippi. "Those cops who stopped us said we had them in our trunk."

  Matt reared back in his chair, surely tight with all he'd eaten. "They didn't believe that."

  "I didn't think they did." Celeste picked up her fork and plowed into the rich hot food again.

  "They was just trying to make life hard for you is all. Slow you down." Mrs. Owens took a long swig of iced tea and poured more into her jelly-jar glass, taking a dainty sprig of mint from a saucer and shoving it down into the tea. Just like Momma Bessie did in summer, only there were no lemons on this table and Momma Bessie's house had never been this hot. Out the back door in Detroit was a spread of green grass and roses, peonies, an apple tree. Mrs. Owens would be the same kind of woman if she lived like Momma Bessie lived. Stark but warm at the same time, loving but severe. What brought these women to that place? Bones, Celeste thought, the lost and the found.

  Then there were only chewing sounds and the small clanks of forks on plates and ice in glasses speaking into the dimming evening air. The red and white checkered table cloth danced under the plates of food. Celeste held onto her iced tea. It was the only cool thing. She gripped it, hoping the chill would work its way up her hand to the rest of her body. Seeing the trees out the back door made her dream of the shade, quick breezes that shook branches, rustled leaves. It was a memory.

  "Those white boys po mommas and daddies never thought this place could be so hellish as it is." Mrs. Owens got up from the table to spoon out three servings of peach cobbler. She put them on the table just beside the still-working dinner plates. Matt eyed the cobbler and continued piling in the food. His stomach didn't seem to have a bottom, or maybe he was being polite to Mrs. Owens, since she'd cooked all that food in honor of their arrival. With that thought, Celeste ate more of the dinner, already feeling stuffed, sure now that she'd have to use that dreaded outhouse before this night was over.

  "You sure right, Mrs. Owens," Matt said. He looked at Celeste then took a toothpick out of the little box on the table and openly picked his teeth. She knew that was for her-his way of telling her again not to get Detroit-siddity in this house. "That Chaney boy grew up here so his people know all about Mississippi. They been living it."

  Celeste wanted to roll her eyes good and hard at Matt, but instead she studied the kitchen with its shelves-some doorless, some with lopsided doors-not wanting to see if Matt dislodged some slight string of chicken or torn piece of collard. The enameled gas stove with side-by-side oven doors looked rich and out of place. The refrigerator, too. Matt twirled the toothpick in his mouth like an old man at a shoeshine stand or a would-be gangster leaning against a corner on some big city summer night.

  "Still and all, nobody wants their child to be hurt whether they been living here or not." Mrs. Owens's eyes grew sad. "That's why I sent my boys away from here."

  "Mrs. Owens got two boys up in Chicago." Matt continued picking his teeth.

  Celeste wondered how anybody kept their children with them in this place. They should all have been sent somewhere else, especially the boys. It was right out of the Bible, only Negro people didn't claim it as so. Kill all the boy children. Find the baby Jesus. Hang them, shoot them, beat them to death. Not just in Mississippi. All over the place. It was the boys, the men who brought down the wrath of white people. Leave the women to manage on their own, to make do, to be the disconnected maids needing to be familied-in somewhere, somehow. The isolated woman in the small house on the barren road.

  "Anyway, we prayin' they hiding somewhere, scared out of their minds." Matt put the used toothpick on the side of his plate next to the low hill of chicken bones, slid the dinner plate to the side, and dove into the cobbler.

  "I hope so. I pray so. I just don't think so." Mrs. Owens spoke with a dreadful finality. The three were dead and Mrs. Owens knew it.

  Matt didn't say a word. Celeste did her best to clean both her plates and felt like she needed to go somewhere and lie down. Early evening light cut in through the small kitchen window and threw shadows on the walls.

  Matt wanted to get on the road to Bogalusa before dark. He hugged Mrs. Owens at the front door. The older woman remained stiff but needing at the same time. Celeste walked him to the car, carrying a large metal pitcher to fill with fresh water from the spigot for her bedroom. He told her to find the pay phones in Pineyville and to check in with the Jackson office as often as possible. Her church was southwest of the center of town. Reverend Singleton would be in touch with her tomorrow.

  "Be careful." Sudden tears stung her eyes. She wanted to say she was sorry he'd been beaten, sorry things had gotten so testy between them in the car. "What about money, Matt? Should I give her some money for food?"

  "Naw, naw. The movement's taking care of that from donations. If you want to help her out on the side, suit yourself, but be easy with it. Wait a while. But make sure your daddy's got that bail money ready for when you get your proj
ect up and running." Matt leaned on the side of the car.

  "Forgot about that." She hadn't forgotten about it. She just hadn't come up with a way to make a call to Shuck and say it. He needed to send the bail money to the Jackson office in case she got arrested. She'd already been close. But saying that kind of thing to Shuck meant risking the possibility that he would come down there and check on her. She needed to see this through on her own.

  "The Sheriff here's Trotter. Don't play with him. Make it count or don't do it at all." Matt folded his arms across his chest, his shirt and overalls not looking too bad considering all they'd been through. "You be all right."

  She felt like the small girl who got dropped off at a camp she didn't want to go to. Shuck got back into his car and she was supposed to be grown up and stay there with all those strange kids for two weeks. She knew before he turned the key in the ignition that she wasn't going to make it. She bit her lower lip, tried to hold it together feeling all the while like throwing herself down in the dirt and screaming to Shuck to please take her home. But she was grown now and it was Matt, not Shuck. She had to see it through.

  Matt patted her fly-away hair, put a frizzled lock behind her ear. "You almost got you a natural there." He laughed, the knot on his head less conspicuous now.

  "Right." She smirked, thinking of Ramona's soft bowl of hair, and of what that word meant. No pressing and curling. Just natural. She liked it, but knew she'd never have that look.

  "Pineyville's bad, but it ain't no worse than anywhere else in Mississippi. Just be mindful of where you're at." Matt's eyes rambled over the ground near his feet, the house behind them, then off down Freshwater Road.

  "Yeah." She wanted to hug him, but she didn't want to aggravate his bruises. "But, Matt, every town hasn't had a lynching." They stood in a southern Mississippi road in the waning sunlight, facing each other like students on the green in Ann Arbor, but here they talked of lynchings, of disappeared people.

  "You talking about Leroy Boyd James?" He knew she'd roomed with Ramona during orientation and that she was an authority on that lynching business. "Well, we don't know all the towns that have had 'em."

  Matt put his hand on the car door handle and opened the door. "Ramona doesn't know it all because the news about a lot of lynchings never left the small towns where they happened. There wasn't nothing to research. People never fessed up that a murder had even taken place. Negroes just disappeared. Mrs. Owens said it."

  He was right, of course. What difference did it make where in Mississippi she was? Emmett Till had been in Money, Medgar Evers in Jackson, Herbert Lee in Liberty. Ambushed and shot, beaten to death and thrown into a river for organizing for voter registration, standing up to any white man for any reason, winking, eyeballing, accused of raping a white woman, whether ever proven or not. Pineyville was in no way special.

  Matt sat in the driver's seat. Celeste put her head through the busted-out window, wanted to climb into that car with him. She kissed him on the cheek. "All right now." Matt said. "Don't be startin' something you can't finish." He grinned. "Miss Detroit. You all right, girl."

  She'd won him over. She'd never be what he assumed she was at first, a pampered shallow girl from Detroit. Maybe it had as much to do with Shuck as it had to do with her. But she'd held up her end, too. They went through the fire, and they survived. The next step was on her and her alone. She'd earn the badge of courage or she wouldn't. But still, she'd gladly get into that car with him. A big part of her didn't want to stay in this house on this lonely looking road.

  Matt maneuvered the dusty Dodge around, tires grinding gravel, grains of sand flying back, and made the left turn onto the black top going toward Pineyville and then Bogalusa, the heat of the day softening into the slippery humidity of a long summer evening. That blazing sun was gone. Celeste watched the dirty car with the broken-out windows until it disappeared down the highway, feeling like there'd be no leaving Mississippi, that Freshwater Road was all there'd be to her life She filled her bedroom pitcher at the spigot, wondering when Sheriff Trotter would make himself known to her and how.

  The aroma of pine disinfectant permeated the bedroom. No closet, only three nails driven into thin wallpapered walls and a brass clothes tree with bent wire hangers on which to hang her dresses, slacks, skirts, and blouses. Celeste dropped sleep shirts and underwear in the four-drawer dresser and buried her small make-up case behind the underwear, relishing the thought of going au naturel for the entire summer. She slid her gym shoes, white pumps, and sandals underneath the dresser, then shoved her suitcase under the high-sitting bed, everything moving easily across the worn linoleum, so cool under her bare feet.

  A fading, rose-tinted photograph in an oval-shaped wood frame leaned in from the wall above the bed. In it, a tall dark man wearing a baggy World War I uniform stood with his hand resting on the shoulder of a seated young woman. Celeste barely recognized Mrs. Geneva Owens, her hair parted in the middle and pulled back, a high-collared Victorian blouse touching her chin, a black skirt hitting her at the ankles. They sat like people of means, rigidly straight, content and proud.

  "That's my husband, Horation." Mrs. Owens stood in the doorway between the parted curtains. Mississippi Negroes floated like ghosts, tiptoed through life as if to pass unnoticed, so unlike those boisterous Detroiters shouting from cars and buildings, from street corners in summer, bragging of conquests, loud-talking each other into crescendoes of noise, like the regulars at Shuck's Royal Gardens Bar hashing over the day's events, not a shy one in the bunch.

  Mrs. Owens's eyes fluttered then settled on the photograph. "He died nearly ten years ago. Had a piece of something in his head from the war. Just fell down and died." The woman's tone was matter-of-fact, as if his early death had been inevitable.

  "I'm sorry you lost him." Celeste knew from orientation that hospitals in Mississippi wouldn't have treated Mr. Owens anyway. Nowhere was segregation more strict than in hospitals. No one would ever know how many people had died because of that.

  Mrs. Owens pressed the front of her apron with her hands then let them drift. "You need anything else?"

  "I'd like to open the other window." The front one over the screened porch was raised, but the side window was shut. Maybe the nearness of the Gulf of Mexico and of Lake Pontchartrain meant cooler nights in Pineyville. No sign of it yet, but Celeste prayed for it anyway.

  "I been in hereby myself so long, I just leave it closed. Let me see if I can find a old screen or something so the bugs don't eat you alive."

  "Thank you, Mrs. Owens." Celeste didn't know what else to say. The woman lingered, then patted the lace doily on the dresser like Momma Bessie would do, eternally smoothing the bumps, beating back all signs of life's irregularities. You knew how to make do, and you learned how to make better. She scanned the room, then pulled a wrinkled photograph from her pocket. "This here's my two boys. They living in Chicago." She handed Celeste the snapshot.

  Celeste turned on the small bedside lamp. The woman's sons were plain young men whose shirtsleeves hit above the wrist bone, making their hands seem unnaturally large. They stood grinning with uneven teeth. "Handsome." She glanced again at the wall-photo of Mr. Owens. "Like their father. Have you been to Chicago?"

  "I visited them. Never seen so many people. Too many. They took me ridin' on that train? Above the streets? My, my." Mrs. Owens's eyes sparkled with her memory. "Didn't much like it."

  "It's beautiful, by Lake Michigan." Celeste regretted saying it. Those boys probably didn't live anywhere near Lake Michigan or in the beautiful part of Chicago, from the looks of that photograph.

  Mrs. Owens pocketed the picture. "Well, I'm glad they're up there."

  Celeste heard the emphasis on "up there." The woman could say it a million times, but she must never sound as if the north was better. It was this place that had to be made more livable.

  "You mighty welcome here." She floated through the curtain-door, a heartfelt greeting in her voice.

  "Thank y
ou." Celeste wondered if something she'd said had relaxed the woman. Certainly not her talk of unidentified bones at the dinner table. Or the woman might well have been wrought up because they arrived a little late. That was cause for grave alarm in Mississippi. Then too there'd been a lot of talk in Jackson about manners during orientation. Already, complaints had come in about some volunteers being too aggressive and even condescending. So far, she'd stayed away from any of that.

  Celeste leaned a snapshot of Shuck and her brother Billy against her small rubber-band jar on the dresser top and a square silver-framed photograph of Wilamena and Cyril Atwood standing near a blooming saguaro. She switched the photos back and forth then put her toothbrush, tooth paste, and other necessities between the photos. Wilamena had a tight smile on her face as if she'd just been pricked by the cactus spikes or perhaps was seeing out of the photo into this room on Freshwater Road. She never would've stepped in the door of this slat-board house with no bathroom. But here she was. Celeste chuckled.

  Cyril Atwood's face had not a hint of Negro-ness, certainly not in that little photograph. Celeste searched his face with her racial Geiger counter, the one that Negro people keep revved and ready for those quick identifications of passing-for-white-Negroes who were everywhere. Not once did the machine go off. Nothing Negro there. Wilamena swore he was Negro and then fussed at Celeste for making so much of it. What difference did it make? Shuck mumbled, keeping his cool, shook the man's hand and soon after excused himself. She hadn't packed another photo of Wilamena. This was it. No photo would be worse. Just because she'd been a motherless child for most of her growing years didn't mean she had to advertise it.

  Lace curtains winnowed the last gray streaks of evening as she scooped cool water from the metal basin onto her face and soaped her arms, the tiny abrasions from the car window glass already dried over. In the cracked mirror, she checked her face for cuts, then poured pitcher water over her toothbrush, squeezed out a line of toothpaste, scoured her mouth, and spit in the basin. The scummy basin water now had toothpaste froth floating on top. She rinsed the toothbrush with clean water, poured a small amount in her glass and gargled, spitting again into the basin. The old woman had cautioned her about pouring dirty basin water near the house-best to take it to the outhouse, far clear of the flowers and vegetables.