The afternoon that changed everything was in late summer. He’d dropped by Fishbein’s Funeral Home with the week’s receipts for the bail bondsman outfit Bailey had talked his partner into three months earlier. Minerva opened the door to the private quarters on the second floor with her eyes downcast. Seeing the soft leather spats with brass buttons no one else wore anymore but which Bailey favored for their undeniable elegance, she lit up and raised her face to meet his. Magnus! She jumped up a bit to hug him. They shared an outburst of tenderness, then separated. He felt an emptiness at the spot she’d pressed against, but it was warm and entirely pleasant. She led him to the parlor.
Well, Miss Minnie, he said. Where’s your daddy?
At the mikvah. Did you forget? Tonight begins Tisha B’Av.
Over the years, Bailey had come to know about Jews. He knew the mikvah was a ritual bath and that Fishbein always went there before a solemn holiday, and especially on this day of mourning for the destruction of their temple in Jerusalem and by extension all calamities that had befallen Jews ever since. Forget about New Year’s and Pesach, thought Bailey. For Fishbein, Tisha B’Av was the holiest day of the year. His mind tsk-tsked. Poor little Minnie, born to all that sadness. What good did her father’s perpetual grief do her? Bailey didn’t fixate on his own people’s miseries from the day they were captured in Africa and sold into slavery. He figured there was enough misery around day to day. Why wallow in the past? But Jews. If Fishbein were anything to go by, the past was their world entire.
Do you want tea? Minerva asked. Although he did not, she looked so eager to do something for him, he said yes. She left him alone for a bit, during which time he thumbed idly through papers on Fishbein’s desk to see what he could see. She returned carrying a heavy silver tray with teapot and glasses that sat inside holders of filigreed silver, along with lemon slices, sugar cubes, and hard cookies studded with almonds on china plates embossed with gold. He smiled. She’d brought out the best to him, a teenager playing grown-up lady, biting her lower lip with concentration as she laid the tray down on the mahogany table between them. She held her breath and knit her brow until her task was accomplished without rattling glasses or sloshing tea out of the pot, after which she plopped down on her father’s humpbacked velvet couch. Relieved and happy, she sat back and slowly let the air out of her chest.
Sweet Jesus, Bailey thought. She has no idea how fetching she is. Another man, a white man, would be on her side of that table in a heartbeat, sitting close by for the joy of watching her heat rise until, poor little firecracker, she exploded in his waiting arms. As if to confirm his fears, she served them both then took a cube of sugar between her pretty teeth and sipped tea through it with her lips parted. When she’d finished, the tip of her tongue darted out to take the rest of the sugar into her rosebud of a mouth. Her eyes sparkled with merriment. Bailey grew flustered, surprising himself.
You cannot do that, Miss Minnie.
Why, what, Bailey?
It was impossible, but a rush of temper roiled his stomach. He spoke with an anger toward her, one he had no idea lived inside him.
How can you not know? How can you not? Surely you know the world of men is selfish and vile, devoted to the spoilin’ of young gals like you. And you, my dear redheaded child, are a torment and a torture designed to plague the masculine world until it can ravage you. You must learn to disguise your heart or men will pluck it from you and eat it for breakfast.
He found himself leaning forward, slapping his thigh for emphasis.
You must, you must! Or you will be ruined. Think what that would do to your daddy, child. Think on it for a time.
He fell back in his chair. His breath came hard. Minerva Fishbein looked at him without expression. Her chin tucked inward, her red hair fell over her brow, and her eyes bored into him like flame. The silence between them grew thick. Magnus Bailey squirmed, finding himself in the rare and uncomfortable position of not knowing what would come next. The timely miracle of Fishbein’s return home saved them all.
The Jew’s face beamed with the purity of the ritually cleansed. His presence charged the room with light, dispelling the dark, restless mood that had sprung up over the tea service like a lightning bolt chasing a demon. Magnus Bailey concluded his business and left, feeling saved from he dared not think what.
After that day, everything between Bailey and the Fishbeins changed. Minerva’s looks to him went limpid. She quieted in his presence. She stared at him from shadowed corners. He would think her gone from the room, then, on quitting her father, turn to find her just behind him, speechless, staring. It was terrifying. He blamed himself, his arrogance in thinking he shared a parenthood over her. Of his own fault, the tide of the child’s affection toward him had irrevocably turned. How long it would be before she expressed herself openly he had no idea, but he feared her inevitable confession greatly. From that moment on, he searched for a way to disengage his fortunes from that of the Fishbeins. Then, like a gift from the devil, the riots came and gave him one.
Of course, no one but he knew what was in his mind or how he intended to accomplish his goal. Bailey sat there rocking on Horace and Aurora Mae’s porch with Fishbein, who was in as playful a mood as ever he saw him, while his daughter, Bailey’s nemesis, slept soundly inside. Magnus Bailey counted the remaining steps of his plan to escape from the imbroglio that was the curse of a white woman’s passion for a colored man in America and was calmed.
VI
At dinner, Aurora Mae sat closest to the stove by the head of the table, with Horace facing her at the other end. Mags and Fishbein flanked Aurora Mae on the right side of the table. The baby lay on blankets set in a wood box near her mother. Magnus Bailey and Minerva sat together on the opposite side. How he and the girl wound up next to each other was none of Bailey’s doing or desire, but there she was anyway. When they’d started their exodus from East St. Louis, Mags rode in the caravan with Bailey, her baby at the breast, while the Fishbeins drove behind in the funeral car. Once they were out from under the city’s gaze and in the wilderness that lay between that place and the Stanton farm, positions got switched about in a way that Bailey could not recount for love or money. It was the same with the dinner table.
After a time, Mags took up Sara Kate and retired with her to Aurora Mae’s room. The others drank wildflower tea. The hostess chatted with Magnus Bailey, showing him the grace any woman shows a guest at her elbow and nothing more, but her attentions unsettled Fishbein’s daughter. Her feet tapped under the table, she fidgeted noisily with her plate. Bailey, unable to hear when her father spoke, put his hand over hers to still it.
I will leave the hearse with your cousin Mags, Fishbein told the Stanton siblings. I am done with that business. She can sell it or not, I don’t care. All of the goods in it are hers. To the furnishings from the house, I have added what she mights need from the kitchen. There are also some of the things from the workshop that George tells me long ago she is interested in.
Horace found the use of a gypsy wagon a near inconceivable choice of vehicle for a white man of means. He wanted to ask why Fishbein traveled by such a method rather than by motorcar or even an old-fashioned coach but didn’t dare be so forward. Instead, he asked, How’d you come by that caravan?
Ah, it’s an interesting story, Mr. Stanton.
Horace smiled. He just loved the way the man talked. He settled back in his chair, holding his teacup at his chest, ready for a good one.
When we decided to embark on our travels …
You all’s wanderin’.
Yes, our wanderings. First I am making some decisions about what to take with us and what to leave, how we might ferry Mags McCallum and Sara Kate back to her people along with their belongings. I’ll tell you this now, because she isn’t here to stops me. Mags McCallum has only seen the hearse in use twice. There are not too many bereaveds who wish to pay the fee for it, a fee which I’ve
had to make high. The costs of the petrol alone!
He raised his eyes to heaven for emphasis, then tilted his head and shrugged. Horace mimicked him in response. When they were both done, Fishbein continued.
I see you understand. Now both those two times, I watch her from my rooms when the bus is loaded with the peoples and the flowers and the dead, and George McCallum, so splendid in his black suit and top hat flowing with crepe, gets behind the wheel to drive to the cemetery. She is proud like a mama when her boy is bar mitzvah. Beaming! Nu. The first decision is I will give it to her. I don’t care what she does with it. She can saw off the angels and use them to decorate her yard. She can sells it. It means nothing to me anymore. And I think it might mean a little bit to her.
Now, if we are going to Memphis, I am thinking how is the best way to get there. You will see, Mr. Stanton, that I am a widowed Jew with a beautiful young daughter and our companion is a Negro who is not, shall we say, shy. On the railway, on the big roads, this could attract problems to us, no? So we decide to find some kind of carriage and make a camping expedition of our way to Memphis. I send Magnus Bailey to the livery to make a list for me what there is we mights buy. When he tells me I have the option of this magnificent wagon as I have not seen since I left Europe, I am immediately against it. It is common. It is garish. But my daughter is enchanted by it. She will have no other. What can I say? I am a papa who indulges his girl, who is no longer little.
Alright. The next thing is to negotiate a price with its owner. O mine Gott. You would not believe the creature who comes to us for this purpose. He is a dark little man with bulging black eyes, in a threadbare suit and an orange shirt, his scarf purple and red. He is wearing gold hoops in his ears and on his fingers rings of every metal you can name, each one carved into fantastical shapes or set with bright stones I can see are merely glass. Oh, and on his head there is a black hat with a feather that screams ‘The mountains of south of Europe is my home, if home I had.’ He walks into my house with such swagger, I am thinking any minute he will begin to dance.
Fishbein raised his arms above his head, waved them from side to side, and snapped his fingers to demonstrate. Horace thought he might get up and dance himself. That, he thought, would be quite a sight. But the man stayed in his seat, shrugged, and continued.
I offer him schnapps. He takes, and we drink. He tries to rob me, but we make a fair price in the end, which I make up later in a contract for Bailey to bring to the livery with the payment. Then just before the gypsy is leaving, he stops on his way to the door and shudders. Truly, from head to toe, he shakes like leaves in the wind. I help him to a seat. With great emotion, he tells me it is his habit to speak to the dead, and the voices in my house are so very many they are shouting inside his head. What’s more, they have news for me. Oh, I am thinking this man is a trickster who sees perhaps the grief which has lived in me many years. I brace myself, ready to deny him. How could he, a man from nowhere, hear my beloveds when I cannot? But what he says has nothing to do with my own. He tells me the voices are telling him that a stranger in my house will lose the most cherished thing and then find it again after a long time, but there will be hearts broken all along the way, most especially at the end. Now I know he is a trickster. There are no strangers in my house. And if there were, what kind of thing is this to predict? It is the story of every life! So I thanks him and let him go.
A ridiculous person, no? But an interesting one. I have thought many times about him, what his life musts be like, what maybe did he do with the price of his wagon. During our travel so far, you know, Minerva has told me of queer trinkets made of sticks and leaves and little bundles of hair tied with string she finds stuffed in the caravan’s floorboards and walls. If he left them there to protect or to curse us, I cannot say.
Horace, who had been listening, enraptured, stirred in his chair. He was happy to have something to offer his guest, something useful.
My sister here’s an expert in old-time remedies and such. Maybe she can figure out what those objects are for, if you give her a look.
Aurora Mae nodded. I can try.
All three turned to Minerva to ask her to fetch the things, but she had fallen asleep against Magnus Bailey’s shoulder, her hands wound tight around his biceps. The Stantons gave Bailey a look of no small concern while Fishbein appeared completely unaware that an important protocol had been breached.
In the morning, Bailey and the Fishbeins left after tender farewells, with hugs and handshakes all ’round. For Mags Preacher McCallum, it was a most solemn occasion, signifying the true end of her life with George. From now on, there would be no one around her who had really known him, no one who had touched him or knew his voice or appreciated his kindness and honesty. No one to whom she could say, Remember the time George did this or laughed at that? No one among the cousins of the family plantation could do that, not even Aurora Mae and Horace, whose meetings with George were limited to the wedding. Not the way the Fishbeins and Magnus Bailey could. As the gypsy caravan rolled down the lawn and into the road below, she stood on the porch of Aurora Mae’s house holding Sara Kate, waving good-bye, heartsore, with tears in her eyes. She felt she would see none of them ever again and indeed, it was ten years before she did.
Bailey drove the mules. Fishbein sat next to him, and Minerva rode in the wagon, placid, happy to have her men to herself again. Things were well set up in the back. There were mattresses, bottles of water, and a chest stocked with food so they could eat and sleep on the road in comfort. There were oil lamps and a brazier designed for cooking. They had blankets and linens and a washboard and tub. They passed the bridge at Thebes marveling at its splendor from a distance. When they came to Cairo from the wild western banks of the great river, they decided to stop and resupply before going farther. Magnus Bailey walked into town to bring back what they needed rather than expose them all to unpredictable judgments in an unknown town. He took a knapsack and was gone for two days. When he returned to their encampment, the knapsack was gone, his face was bruised, a patch of his hair had been pulled out, and the sleeve was torn from his jacket. Minerva took one look at him, groaned, and fell to her knees next to the cold cook fire. She wept and piled ashes on her head as if to say Kaddish for him, which broke his heart.
That’s a mean place, Magnus Bailey said, but look, I’m back in one piece.
He put his hand on top of Minerva’s hair and shook the ash from it.
Minnie, Minnie, I’m alright.
He crouched next to her and raised her chin with his hand.
Look at me, gal. I’m alright.
He pulled from his pockets the goods those who had set upon him did not acquire and lay them before her as a lover might blossoms picked in a field. A bit of candy, coffee, a bar of soap, two tins of sardines and a packet of dried herring wrapped in cloth, three short, thick candles. She barely looked at them. Her eyes brimming with tears, she studied his face, finding the last forty-eight hours in its depths. Stabbed to the core by what she saw, she collapsed shivering against his chest, where he rocked her until she quieted. He looked over her head at her father, who spread his arms, palms up, his features set in the same grim expression he wore daily, as if her state of desolation was just a variation of her usual tantrums. A thousand sentiments pounded through Magnus Bailey’s blood and the last of these was, How sweetly her heart beats against mine, which terrified him.
That night, they slept under the stars on the mattresses they’d brought, each of them fully dressed, covered by a thick blanket to provide the warmth the fading fire would not. It was a clear night with a half moon and swarms of stars. A rustling in the brush woke Magnus Bailey from fitful dreams, or perhaps it was the flutter of Fishbein’s snores or the pain at his spine from the beating he’d sustained.
As if she’d been awake the whole time waiting for him to stir, Minerva’s voice called softly. Magnus.
Yes, child?
/> Why are we going to Memphis again?
It’s a city of opportunity, and we need a change. All of us.
I don’t.
How can you say that? Do I have to remind you of the night we fled the riots? The horrors we saw, the terror, the hatred everywhere? Child. George McCallum was slaughtered.
I’m sorry about that, of course. But.
But what?
It was the most wonderful night of my life.
Before she could tell him why, Bailey got up muttering about a call to nature. He leaned against a tree a good distance apart from the Fishbeins and considered running immediately, in any direction, without even his boots. Behind him, a woman’s voice sounded, growing louder as the woman advanced, step by step.
We were together, alone, beneath the bridge, the voice said, and he knew it was Minerva Fishbein’s voice, but it didn’t sound like her; it sounded like no one he knew, a voice made of molten honey and fire. The sound of it did not so much fall upon his ears as enter them to inhabit the inside of his head, where it would haunt him forever. If he’d known the term, he would have said it was the voice of a dybbuk. He broke into a sweat. As much as he wanted to flee barefoot into the night, he was held fast by the voice and could not move.
You held me against you. I buried my mouth in your neck. I tasted the salt of you, I could smell your fear but also your courage, your devotion. Though hell was all around, I knew I was safe.
Marching to Zion Page 8
