Reverend Singleton grew nervous and spoke fast. "Now, we know he's not in his right mind today." Poor Reverend Singleton was caught in the middle now, wanting this summer to be about voting rights and elections coming and here they were stuck on the death of a child.
"Wasn't in his right mind before today." Celeste cut her eyes at no one in particular, sat on the window ledge, praying it would hold her weight.
"Shush." Mrs. Owens threw her a look. Celeste lowered her head, a new kind of heat coming out of her body.
"He thinks the idea of freedom school got a hold of her mind, made her do things she wouldn't otherwise do." Reverend Singleton's hands paced the stingy brim of his straw hat. "To him, you and the freedom school, the thoughts about freedom, all the same thing."
"Maybe he got a hold of her." Celeste bounced up off the window ledge. Her anger startled them. It was nothing compared to what she felt. She wanted to punch holes in the tacked-on screen, throw the rocking chair out on the road, kick in the ribs of the bony dogs and scream at the trees. She wanted to run down the road and yell obscenities in front of the Tucker house. The older people waited for her to quiet.
Reverend Singleton stepped over to pat Celeste's arm. "Don't you worry. We'll straighten him out soon as the shock wears off."
She knew what that meant. She'd be gone at the end of the summer. That's when the shock would wear off. Whatever breath she had left inside emptied out. Her ears felt hot, full of cotton. Nothing down Freshwater Road looked the same. It narrowed and shrank; the hot sun burned the life out of it.
Mrs. Owens's hands sprang to her heart. "What 'bout them boys took Mr. Tucker's car? They mean as dirt. Maybe they did something?" Reverend Singleton didn't seem to hear Mrs. Owens's question. "They got ways of killing a person. It's not always guns and ropes."
"Sure you right." Reverend Singleton looked at her. "Needs to be checked thoroughly." A nervous little cough. "I sure don't know how she got all the way to that creek down there. It's nearly ten miles."
"Maybe someone drove her down there." Celeste spit it out.
"I'ma walk down and see Mrs. Tucker soon as I get me something to eat. She probably pretty bad off about now," Mrs. Owens said, before turning back inside. Celeste knew the older woman wouldn't want to cry in front of them. Kitchens were the crying rooms for women.
The minister watched Celeste. "Don't you go down there. Never. The word's not out yet so the kids'll probably show up at the church this morning. I'll be back in a few minutes to pick you up."
"What am I supposed to tell them?" Celeste stood, her nose touching the frayed screen, feeling like she didn't even have room to cry for Sissy. She'd make it a short session, send them home with Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.
"Tell them Sissy's gone. Rest'll come later."
Celeste felt somewhere far back a slight relief taking shape that at least this death wasn't another Negro man who'd fallen into the region's oldest trap. "That creek's south of here. I just don't see why she'd be going that way. She knows north. Nothing we talked about mentioned going south."
Reverend Singleton's look chiseled her down to the bone. "What're you saying?"
"What I'm saying is, if the police don't investigate..." Her eyes went back and forth from Reverend Singleton to the Tucker house down the road.
"The police don't care about some little black child floating in a stream. The FBI either." Reverend Singleton got in his car. When he took off, a plume of rusty orange dust billowed up and swooned back down.
The flat, horrendous truth of what he said made her tired all over again, made her want to go back on the lumpy bed and hold the pillows between her legs, over her ears. It wasn't that Shuck, Grandma Pauline, and Momma Bessie hadn't said the same thing in one way or another all along. It was different now. This wasn't some unknown person's long-ago story. Not even a crosstown, East Side story she'd read in the daily paper. This was closer even than Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner. She was a child, like the children in the church in Birmingham, completely innocent, no threat to anyone for any of the well-known reasons. A child who wanted to dream herself out of this place.
"Bodies in creeks and rivers tell their own stories." Mrs. Owens was back at the door, quiet and sad.
"Not unless somebody who knows what they're talking about gets involved." Celeste said it but didn't know if Mrs. Owens heard her.
When Reverend Singleton returned to pick her up, Celeste was standing on the steps, her book-bag locked in her arms. He'd changed his clothes and though his eyes looked weary, he seemed himself again. Nothing moved on all of Freshwater Road except the car heading back for the two-lane. Freedom Summer came first and in the whole scheme of things, Freedom Summer meant more. Deaths had been piling up here for a long, long time. If the movement was successful, that would change. You had to think in terms of priorities, of long-range benefits to the whole community.
As hard as she tried to grapple with this, Sissy's death kept riding over everything else. In her mind, the small deaths made the larger ones possible. Protect Sissy and everything else would fall into place.
Pineyville's town center didn't let on that one of its children had been pulled from a muddy creek. People walked in and out of the stores, pulled newspapers out of the boxes, cruised in trucks, strolled with umbrellas against the sun. The magnolia trees and the live oaks hadn't changed. Mr. Tucker's Hudson wasn't parked behind the gas station.
Tony Mobley sat waiting on the front step. His unusual stillness told her that he already knew what had happened. He got up, opened the church doors, and out came a long-faced Labyrinth, Georgie, and the other children. Now she had to go in there and sit with them, talk with them, help them to cope with the death of one of their own, somehow subtly give them the tools they needed to understand how terrific parents could be but also sometimes how dreadful. She would not be able to name names; Mr. Tucker was respected in Pineyville.
23
Celeste squatted on her haunches beside the spigot as the sun slinked on towards the horizon and the cloudless sky went blue-gray with streaks of orange. String-tied bunches of collards wrapped in newspapers had appeared on the steps of the house last evening and this morning. The water sprinkled and splashed and cooled her legs as she washed each broad-faced leaf front and back. Under the running water, her sun-dark hands shriveled. Her forearms cramped from the repeated motion, and she felt spasmodic aches in her back and thighs from the bending and squatting. Still, the work relieved her, numbed her longing for Ed and her suspicions about what really happened to Sissy. She'd rechecked her map. Cataboula Creek appeared then disappeared south of Pineyville, not far, but far for a child. Sissy was a runner; she could've made it there, but Celeste still didn't understand why she'd even start out running south. She tried to read where the creek flowed from, what river it emptied into. But the map wasn't clear.
When she'd filled the tub with cleaned collards, she carried it around to the back of the house where Mrs. Owens hacked off the coarse stems and rechecked each leaf for bugs and sand. Salt pork and hocks boiled in frothy water, smelling like Momma Bessie's Easter Sunday dinner, then the sweetness of the onions, and finally the greens, the mixing of the three turning into something that made you irrationally hungry, made you want to sit down and devour a plate full of greens with a little vinegar and sliced tomatoes and nothing else.
Celeste sat with a glass of iced tea and untied her red farmer's hand kerchief from her hair, folded it into a square, and used it to wipe her sweat-drenched face. She'd been washing greens all afternoon. She held the cold glass to her forehead, then her neck. Food was the balm of mourning. In Detroit, it was food and drink. Death brought the whiskey bottles out of their handsome cabinets. A mourner might end up drunk in a kitchen chair, stuffed with food, narcotized against the pain of releasing a loved one. The eating, drinking, philosophizing, and reminiscing went on for hours, even days. By the day of the funeral, you were ready to put the deceased in the ground just so you could rest.<
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Mrs. Owens drained most of the water off a large pot of cooled greens, then divided them into bowls that she covered with wax paper and set in the refrigerator. The last cooking pot steamed up the kitchen, sending vapors out through the back door and the opened windows. She poured herself a glass of tea and then sat down with Celeste, the two of them sweat-soaked and weary. They cooked for Sissy's repast after her funeral tomorrow.
"You oughta open a restaurant in town." Celeste smiled through her fatigue, felt like she'd been out picking cotton. "White people'd pay for those greens you cook."
Mrs. Owens's dress front and apron were splotched with greens juice and water. Her swollen knuckles clutched her iced tea glass, her fingers beginning to arch out in the wrong directions. "I couldn't do this every day, girl. Besides, they been getting 'em for free for years. If not mine, then somebody else's."
Celeste leaned back in her chair, already calling Shuck in her mind, already asking him to stake the Negro people of Pineyville by helping them open their own restaurant. The closest Negro restaurant was in Hattiesburg. Calling Shuck. Only now did she think of what that would mean in light of Wilamena's letter. She always called Shuck. Before college, she called him at the club when she got home from school, from dates, from other relatives' houses. Calling Shuck. Now it was changed. Should she tell him? Ask him? How to form the sentences in her mouth that might separate them in some unseen way, some subtle letting go of all that had been? Would he still hold on to her if Wilamena was telling the truth? If Wilamena didn't really know, what would he want to do? Cast her out into the anonymous world, the world of miscellaneous unattached people who drifted?
"You all right, child?" Mrs. Owens's hand was on Celeste's arm.
Celeste blinked away the tears that pooled in her eyes. She had to keep herself there at the table with Mrs. Owens, but she wanted to run out the door and down Freshwater Road to cry in solitude. "Yes, ma'am." They had been talking about starting a restaurant in Pineyville, she remembered. "We'll call it Madame Stone's Tea Room and serve whiskey in china teacups, collard greens, red beans with pickled pork and cornbread, shrimp and okra over rice on china plates." Celeste saw the two of them slaving over the collards then serving them on pretty plates. Lace cloths like Momma Bessie used. Teapots of whiskey, homemade in the backwoods and storebought in New Orleans, poured into delicate cups. No more dry Pearl River County.
"Sounds nice enough. But we be under that jail soon as the sheriff finds out what's in those tea cups. And he will find out. Believe you me." Her eyes sparkled in her grooved brown face. "I don't take to drinking."
Celeste strained to keep up her end of the conversation, had lost interest in the idea. "Who knows? He might like it."
"Soon as we start taking in the money, some jealous no-'count come along and burn it down." Mrs. Owens sounded deep and sorrowful. "I know what they did over in Florida, and I heard what they did out in Oklahoma. People always leaving here and writing back, moving about trying to find some place better. Words travel."
"You mean like that riot in Detroit a long time ago?"
The kitchen grew silent but for the last steaming pot, the humming refrigerator pulling power from the lines in the back, the soft ting of ice cubes on glass. They could've been the early crowd at the Royal Gardens. Work-hard women who stopped by for a gin and tonic and an easy laugh on their way home.
"And more." Mrs. Owens turned toward the back door like a deer in the woods. Red hats and white sheets coming. Celeste followed her look, pushing away from the table and ready to drop to the floor.
"You lock that door?" The words stumbled on each other, her body frozen in the chair.
Celeste tried to see into the gray early night outside the door, trying to read the other woman's thoughts. "Yes, ma'am." The sandy earth obscured sound like baffling in a theatre. She waited for Mrs. Owens to move knowing she'd follow her, either to the floor, the front of the house, or to grab a cast-iron skillet to use as a weapon. Not a thought of nonviolence. Then came a faint knocking on the back wall of the house.
"Who's there?" Mrs. Owens went to the door, standing to the side.
Mrs. Tucker came up the steps so that the light of the kitchen revealed her face. "Ain't nobody but me."
Mrs. Owens unlatched the screen and held the door open.
Mrs. Tucker's dress belt hung from one loop and the weight of the open buttons pulled the bodice away from her chest so that the top of her slip showed. She wore no shoes. Her hair stuck out in tufts on one side and lay flat on the other. In the light, Celeste could see what looked like a straightening comb burn blistering on her retreating cheek.
Mrs. Owens sat her down, brought ice from a tray, and held it to the woman's face. "Celeste, pour Zenia some tea."
"You supposed to use butter." The words caught in her throat.
Mrs. Owens continued her first aid. "Not'less you want to cook it some more.
Celeste put the glass on the table, thinking of Sissy the first time she came running through that back door from among the pines.
Mrs. Owens studied Zenia Tucker. "You scared us to death."
Zenia drank. "Didn't mean to." Her hands shook. Mrs. Owens helped her get the glass to her mouth and back to the table without spilling all the tea in her lap. "I can't stay long." She kept her eyes down. "They went over to Hattiesburg to get Sissy. Him and the Reverend. Take her to the church..." She broke off. Sissy's casket would be small enough to fit in the back seat of the big Hudson. "I can smell them greens all the way down the road. Smell good." Mrs. Tucker's hands rested.
Maybe the aroma of the greens spread through the air all the way into town. A hundred white people drawn to their windows trying to place where the aroma came from, then leaving their houses to follow the scent like hungry ghosts in the night, walking along the two-lane in single file, bringing their glistening faces all the way to Freshwater Road to eat Geneva Owens's greens. Coming to the home they left a long time ago, hands out, hearts out, needy for the love in that pot of greens.
Zenia Tucker sighed so deeply it seemed her heart would have to stop beating. When she inhaled, the words rode out. "If I had a gun, I'd put it to my own head." She dropped her eyes again, searching her lap, her dress, her hands that wrung, one over the other, as if they throbbed with some unrelenting arthritic pain.
Mrs. Owens turned the fire off under the greens. "Well, then, I'm glad you don't have one." She released the lid to rush the cooling. "You've got them boys to raise." From her place at the stove, Mrs. Owens gestured to Celeste to leave the two older women alone.
She excused herself knowing full well she was going to lurk and listen. She crouched on the linoleum floor just behind her curtain door.
Mrs. Tucker's broken voice came in fits and starts through the short hall. "He saying he think them white boys took his car that time killed Sissy. To get back at him for having the car in the first place."
"I've seen them driving real slow by the gas station." Mrs. Owens's voice flattened. "Tryin' to scare somebody. I wouldn't put it past 'em."
If Celeste moved, even breathed too deeply, Mrs. Owens, who knew every sound the little house made at every hour of the day and night, would know she was listening. She leaned her head against the doorless doorframe, feeling the cool linoleum. Ice cubes clinked as their glasses came down on the table after each sip.
"Sure nice your boys give you that refrigerator, Geneva."
It was too big and too modern for the kitchen, but Celeste wondered if she could've made it through the summer without its ice trays and cool little blasts every time she opened it.
"Don't know what I'd do without it." Mrs. Owens stopped. The silence between the two women pounded like muffled drums. A tapping, perhaps a spoon on the tabletop.
Celeste crawled halfway out of her room into the hallway, holding her breath, afraid to lean now for fear the wall would creak. Mrs. Owens only had to peek around a corner to see her sitting there huddled on the floor. The parlor was dark and quiet.
She sat there losing the two women for a moment, feeling like crawling into the room where Ed had slept, pressing her body into the floor to find some scent of him.
Zenia's voice relaxed to a smoother flow. "They still sending you something?
"Don't know what I'd do without that either. My hands don't let me do washing and cleaning the way I used to." Celeste imagined Mrs. Owens holding her hands up so that Mrs. Tucker could see the way the fingers were beginning to angle to the right and left. "Course you know that child give me some money for the summer, too. That's been a help."
Celeste liked the way she referred to her as "that child." She was nearly twenty, but it made her feel like some woman's daughter.
"Oh, I didn't know that. Wished my boys was grown and gone from here." Heavy rocks weighted her words. "Maybe I go with them." She sniffled. Celeste imagined her sitting there with her hair, part fresh-washed kinky and part straightened, tears coming down her face, salt stinging the burn on her cheek. Wanted to strain a little farther into the hall so she could see them-but if she could see them, they could see her. She sat still.
"You might not like it. I didn't. Course you younger than me." Mrs. Owens's tone soothed the air as if she were talking to a troubled child who promised to do better the next time.
"If they go, I'm not staying with him." Mrs. Tucker's voice cut like a newly sharpened carving knife when she said "him." "Shoulda taken Sissy and left a long time ago."
"He's a good provider." Mrs. Owens spoke but it was like a crash, like a crane falling from a mountain-high building. She spoke of Mr. Tucker so differently now. This was the man in whose eyes she'd seen the devil. Why was she being so kind? Celeste nearly gave herself away, wanted to stand from her hiding place and scream. Remember the devil in his eyes? Is the devil a "good provider?" She had to remain still.
"Sometimes I think he did it. Chased her to death. I don't know what he was doing with her. He ain't right." Ice cubes clinking, glasses thudding on the table.
Freshwater Road Page 28
