She knelt in the dirt where they had cast her, wept awhile, then filled her spirit with the thought of seeing Magnus Bailey again. If only they could be together, she thought, all her troubles would melt away. Tired and hungry as she was, this was the idea that saved her, that kept her going, that leapt to her mind over and over. He is near.
It was dusk by the time she took to the road again. Soon enough, before night had time to take hold of the world, two Negro women emerged from a hidden path some distance ahead of her, walking arm in arm, their heads together. Their voices came to her soft as a river breeze on a calm, summer day. They murmured then laughed or gestured with their free arms in a way that bespoke amusement or surprise. Everything about them looked gentle and affectionate. Minerva took a chance and ran up to them, tugged on the back of their clothes. They jumped and turned about.
Who? What? they said, looking behind and beyond her in every direction wondering where this weird white child came from and who might be with her, following in secret.
Begging their pardon for startling them, Minerva told she was on urgent business to find a Magnus Bailey from Tulips End. Did they know it and could they help her find him?
They took her to a plain, unremarkable cabin with two goats tethered in the yard under the shade of a gum tree. Standing there on the porch, her eyes teared, she chewed her lip. Her chest felt as if white-hot nails were implanted between her breasts, searing her insides with every breath. Calling upon the great love within her heart to give her courage, she knocked on the door and waited. A shuffle of footsteps from within nearly put her into a faint. The door creaked open and on the other side was an old black woman, hair pulled back in an unassuming bun, her bony frame draped in a loose flowered dress. She was barefoot. She wore glasses.
Good evening, ma’am, Minerva said, bowing her head a little to show respect and that she meant no harm. I apologize for disturbing a house of mourning. I’m looking for Magnus Bailey. Is he here?
Who’s that, Mama?
The voice of her beloved sent such a blaze of joy through Minerva Fishbein she did not hear how he’d addressed the very-much-alive-and-well woman before her.
Magnus Bailey! she cried out, and he came to her and he was all she could see. The old woman faded from her vision so that she might have been a ghost after all.
Bailey was as she’d never seen him, dressed in overalls and a broadcloth shirt, his feet as bare as his mother’s. His hair, bereft of pomade, sprung up around his head in a thicket of curls. But it was Bailey, it was him, and she threw her arms around his neck and dissolved into a shivering fit of happy tears against his chest. His own eyes welled. He held her close, stroking her back, rocking her as one would any hysterical child, saying: Shhh, shhh. Hush now, my Minnie, hush.
How did you come here? he asked when she’d calmed enough to be led to a deep couch set before a stone fireplace. Does your daddy know you’re here?
In fits and starts she told him the story of her flight from her father’s house, leaving out nothing. When she came to the worst bits, he groaned and held her close again.
Oh, why did you do this? he asked, his voice tortured and raw. Why? Why have you done this to yourself? To your father? Lord, even to me?
She pulled away from him and took his big, black face in her small, white hands.
I’ve lived all my life motherless, she said. It’s a pain I’ve never stopped feeling. There’s a place inside where my mother’s absence eats at me every day of my life. I can’t imagine what a sorrow it is to have a mother, have her always, then watch her grow ill and die. To bury her. I love you too much, Magnus, to let you suffer that alone. I had to come. To look after you as you’ve looked after papa and me for as long as I can remember. And for all that’s happened, I’d do it again. I would.
When she was done, she dropped her hands and looked to her lap. She blushed and smiled, realizing that she’d just confessed her love to the object of her long-suffering, silent passion. She’d seen in his eyes the pain her story caused him and decided he loved her, too, in exactly the way she’d hoped. Then a voice rang through the room, ruining everything.
I’m dead now, am I?
It was the woman who’d opened the door. Minerva Fishbein had forgotten her. The sight, the smell, the touch of Magnus Bailey had driven the woman clear out of her mind. At the sound of her words, Minerva’s back went straight, her ears pricked.
My oh my, son. So this is the mischief you’ve been up to in town. Who is this crazy, ragamuffin child you’ve drug into my house? No wonder you came home to hide out a spell. If you think she’s stayin’ here, you’re as crazy as she is. She needs to leave. Before the people ’crost the hollow get wind of her and kill us all.
Bailey got up and patted the air with his hands.
Now, Mama …
Ma-ma, ma-ma. The two syllables struck Minerva Fishbein like blows. Slowly, the depth of Bailey’s betrayal sunk in. He’d lied to her. And it was an awful, ugly lie. He’d lied to her. And she’d poisoned her life on account of it. She’d been an idiot. A fool. Worse. She was too stupid to live.
She got up. She walked out the door. She walked down the road. Bailey followed her, begging her to stop, to listen to him just a little. She did not answer. He went back to the cabin, put on a jacket and shoes, borrowed a horse and wagon, and took off. When he caught up with his Minnie, she would not speak to him. He blocked her way, halted the horse, and got out, telling her to get into the wagon. She remained mute, but she stood still. He put his arms around her knees and back to pick her up. Her body had no resistance. She was a dead weight, as if drained of life, which made his task difficult. He banged her feet against the buckboard and her head against the top of the seat. Once set, she slumped over, not onto him, who was beside her, but to the opposite end so that she crumpled up in a heap. While all grew dark and cold around them, he shook the reins and drove her home.
When they came to the outskirts of Memphis, Bailey took a square of canvas from the back and threw it over the girl so no one would see he carried an insensate white woman beside him. He drove first to Thomas DeGrace’s house in Orange Mound, rousing the man and telling him to get in the rear of the wagon, they had urgent business to conduct. Sleepy but compliant, Thomas hastily dressed and did as he was told, not even taking the time to ask what in the world was going on. When he came awake from bouncing around in the back, he noticed his cousin was dressed in country clothes. What’s more, he was unkempt and bleary and gave off a troubling scent as strong as marsh mud in August. That unusual state alone was enough to spark a man’s curiosity. He reached forward and lifted a corner of canvas to see exactly what Bailey hauled in the dead of night.
Sweet Jesus! he said on catching a glimpse of the glazed eyes of Fishbein’s daughter. Where’d you find her? The old man’s near dead from worry.
She found me.
When they arrived at Fishbein’s house, Magnus Bailey told Thomas to get Miss Minnie up and out and escort her in. While he did so and amid the great clamor of her homecoming, Bailey slunk away like Judas into the night, leaving the horse and wagon in the other man’s care.
VIII
Before his daughter ran away, the saddest man in the world could present himself as personable, even charming, if he had to. Otherwise, how could he make business? Business required he rise from his grave of memories for the time it took to strike a deal. How else could he pray with the minyan in the Pinch? Unless he shrugged at the kind of woes that afflicted Jews everywhere, the others would ask him why he thought his troubles were so special. Before his daughter ran away, he could sometimes take pleasure in a meal, a starry night, the softness of his sheets, and thank God for them all. Afterward, everything he touched, every sight before his eyes, every morsel of food turned to ash in his mouth. He considered her absence a fresh punishment for those small pleasures he’d allowed into his grieving, guilty heart. By the time she w
ent missing a week, a malaise fiercer than any he’d experienced in the past gripped his heart and soul in its talons and squeezed them dry. Fishbein was a shell, a husk. Whispers were as shouts to him, the fairest breeze a gale. His clothing was a suit of mail studded with thorns.
And then Thomas DeGrace brought her home.
At first, he left the door unanswered. Hope had abandoned him. There seemed no point. But DeGrace was persistent. Holding Fishbein’s inert daughter in his arms, he battered the door so hard with his foot it seemed the thick oak would split. When at last the knob turned, he pushed his way in.
Fishbein staggered aside and cried out, Mine kind! Mine kind!
Minerva’s eyes fluttered open at the sounds and smells of home. She parted her lips but no sound came forth. Fishbein wrung his hands while DeGrace carried Minerva to the parlor to lay her down on the humpbacked couch. He stood back while father and daughter were reunited in a blending of huddled, sobbing shapes.
It took a while, perhaps several days, but eventually Minerva told Fishbein everything that had happened to her, leaving out no detail of the calamities she’d met on the road. Her violation by the robber chief, her ejection from safe haven by the anti-Semite Deacon Brown, her hunger and the sufferance of all her wounds she reported flatly, as if she recited a household shopping list. To hear her tell the tale, her tribulations were no more than inconveniences. Throughout, her eyes were dull and stared ahead. Until she came to her arrival at Tulips End, Fishbein feared her experiences had numbed her completely, that she was beyond repair. Then she tried to tell him of Magnus Bailey’s deceptions.
It turned out, she said, that Ma … Ma … Ma …
Her mouth twisted uselessly. She could not utter his name. First she swallowed her lips, then she jutted them out. She stretched out her neck. She tried again.
Ma … Ma … Ma …
Her hand went to her throat, where the name was trapped. Her nails clawed at her skin. Fishbein grabbed her hands and held them fast before she could draw blood.
Magnus, he said, softly. Magnus.
And she nodded vigorously. Suddenly, her eyes were on fire.
Yes! Yes, Papa. He betrayed me, he betrayed me! His mama is alive! He lied to me! He ran away!
She burst into a flood of tears, howling like a beast of the field. For a few moments, Fishbein was hopeful. If she can weep like that, he thought, perhaps she will heal. But after she stopped, she withdrew inside herself to a place so deep, she drifted through the house like a being without substance, a dark angel or a ghost.
Over the next weeks, it became increasingly doubtful whether Minerva or her father would recover from the catastrophe of her heart’s compulsions. Minerva’s tutors were turned away at the door. The piano gathered dust. There were no trips to the haberdasher or to the bank. Fishbein spent his days in grief. He forsook even the shul. Rather than attend the daily minyan, he sat at home, shoeless, sitting on a stool as if in mourning, reading Lamentations and the Book of Job. After a number of weeks, the rabbi and president of the Baron Hirsch Synagogue visited him to implore him to return to the fold. He did not allow them inside. Dinah, the cook Thomas DeGrace had installed in their home after a long search for a woman who’d worked in Jewish households before and could manage a kosher kitchen, was full of complaints.
Them two just don’t eat! she told him. For him maybe a little soup if I ask pretty and often. For her a piece of bread from time to time. I swear she likes it best dry and old and hard as rock candy. Even on the Sabbath neither one will eat more than an egg or an itty-bitty bite of chicken. It won’t be long ’fore they both keel over, and I will not have folk say that two adult human bein’s in my care died from starvation! I’m tellin’ you, Thomas. Either they start eatin’ or I quit!
Time went by. Dinah quit.
The old man continued to provide DeGrace a weekly stipend for the management of his business, but he no longer bothered to pretend an interest in lumber supplies. DeGrace pressed Fishbein to sell the concern, making himself a healthy commission once he found a buyer, and then he quit his service also. He might have stuck around the Fishbeins for the easy cash, but the girl’s glowering stares unnerved him. He was afraid she might build up enough steam to ask him one day about his cousin, Magnus Bailey, who had plain disappeared. His own mama didn’t know where he was. DeGrace resented Minerva for that.
Father and daughter settled into a desolate life. They went out as little as possible. What they needed was delivered to their back door by the lackeys of tradesmen. Minerva took over from Dinah in the kitchen. Twice a week, she telephoned the grocer, the butcher, the laundry, the coalman and iceman and ordered whatever they required. Afterward, she sat at the kitchen table drinking tea, immersed in her regrets, waiting for deliveries made by Negroes whose faces and bodies she scanned for resemblance to her lost love. When one of these chanced to have the same shade of skin or shape of hand, a gold tooth, perhaps, at just that spot revealed by only the widest smiles, or best of all eyes with any green in them, she took her time telling the man where to lay his burdens down, and took more time in paying him, maneuvering her movements that she might brush against him for an instant and feel, once again, alive. Naturally, she developed a reputation amongst them of a woman to fear or to mock. Watch out for that redheaded gal, the old hands warned new hires. She’s lookin’ for somethin’ that’ll get some poor boy killed one day. Or: That skinny l’il thing is moonbat crazy. A man could blow her over with a single breath, have his way, and be out of town ’fore she opened her eyes and begged for mercy.
There was a colored man sent to fix a leak in the pipes under the kitchen sink who came close to taking advantage of her. There was not much Magnus to him, except that he spoke well and in a voice that reminded her of Bailey’s rich baritone. She got up close to him while he worked, getting on her knees and peering under the sink, asking him questions about the function of wrenches and O rings, just to hear him talk. He worked on his back, glancing over at her from time to time. When his leg nudged her own, she leaned into it, and he smiled. He was reaching out to find some part of her flesh to touch when Fishbein came into the room. Minerva got up quickly before her father noticed anything. The man finished his work. He drew up a bill and she wrote a check to his boss. After he left, she discovered he’d written something in a margin of the bill. Big Sam’s Bar on Beale Street, it said, most any night.
Months went by. Seasons changed. Out of the blue, Minerva started eating. She filled the house with the scents of cabbage, potatoes, and onions, groats and noodles. On Fridays, she baked challah and prepared soup glistening with chicken fat, fish salads, beef, and cinnamon dainties. Infected by her change of mood, her father ate too. One day in the middle of the week, she hired a cab and went downtown by herself, coming home with bobbed hair and a dozen boxes of dresses, hats, stockings, and shoes. Fishbein didn’t know what to make of her transformation, especially the shortened skirts, the painted lips, the boldly colored flowers and feathers that sprang from her hatbands, but it strengthened his miserable heart to see her take an interest in her appearance again. He considered going back to shul, put away Lamentations, and took up Psalms.
Thomas DeGrace had gone on with his life. He filled his time and pockets with pre-Fishbein pursuits: card playing and cockfights, cadging money from rubes and dockworkers to invest in one grand scheme or another. He combed the juke joints up and down the Mississippi for the guitar pickers and blues singers he brought to Memphis, depositing them on whatever free corner Beale Street offered up that they might audition for passersby and build a reputation the bars could not ignore. Most nights after midnight, he could be found collecting his commission from their handouts.
One night he was doing just that when he heard a scuffle in an alleyway. This was nothing unusual in that neighborhood at two in the morning. He tried to ignore it rather than put his nose in where it didn’t belong, as he liked his nose just wher
e it was—on his face. But a voice called out above the thumps and grunts. At the sound of it, every hair on his neck stood up. The voice was familiar, feminine, its tone frantic. Thomas DeGrace, it said, help me!
He turned and peered down the dark depths of brick corridor stinking of booze and horse piss. Two hulking black men battled over the favors of one of the town’s more adventurous whores, a white, red-haired floozy in a skirt that exposed her legs above her powdered knees. She wore black lace garters and red pumps. A lamp outside Big Sam’s exit door illuminated a face painted heavily as a clown’s. It was Minerva Fishbein.
Thomas! Thomas DeGrace! Help me! she said again, extending her hand. Her black-ringed eyes were beggar’s eyes. He could not resist them. He grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her away. Together they ran fast as they could from men too drunk and bruised-up to follow very far. At the river walk, he shoved her inside a shack he knew that sold stolen goods during the day and kept itself quiet as a churchyard at night. Panting, trying to catch her breath, she shrunk against a wall and stared at him. He paced back and forth in front of her, trying to think up what to say. This took some time.
Does your father know what you’ve been up to? he blurted at the end, earning himself a short, bitter laugh in response.
How long has this been goin’ on? he asked next.
She shrugged.
Oh, Miss Minnie. What would Magnus Bailey say? he tried at last.
Marching to Zion Page 10
