Paradise

by Toni Morrison

  Deek gives the orders.

  The men separate.

  Three women preparing food in the kitchen hear a shot. A pause. Another shot. Cautiously they look through the swinging door. Backed by light from the slanted door, shadows of armed men loom into the hallway. The women race to the game room and close the door, seconds before the men position themselves in the hall. They hear footsteps pass and enter the kitchen they have just left. No windows in the game room—the women are trapped and know it. Minutes pass. Arnold and Jeff Fleetwood leave the kitchen and notice a trace of wintergreen in the air. They open the game room door. An alabaster ashtray slams into Arnold’s temple, exhilarating the woman wielding it. She continues to smash until he is down on all fours, while Jeff, taken off guard, aims his gun a tick too late. It flies from his hand when a cue stick cracks his wrist and then, on upswing, rams into his jaw. He raises his arm, first for protection, then to snatch the point of the cue when the frame of Catherine of Siena breaks over his head.

  The women run into the hall, but freeze when they see two figures exit the chapel. As they run back to the kitchen, Harper and Menus are close behind. Harper grabs the waist and arm of one. She is a handful, so he doesn’t see the skillet swinging into his skull. He falls, dropping his gun. Menus, struggling to handcuff the wrists of another, turns when his father goes down. The stock that drenches his face is so hot he can’t yell. He drops to one knee and a woman’s hand reaches for the gun spinning on the floor. Hurt, half blinded, he yanks her left ankle. She crashes kicking at his head with her right foot. Behind him a woman aims a butcher knife and plunges it so deep in the shoulder bone she can’t remove it for a second strike. She leaves it there and escapes into the yard with the other two, scattering fowl as they go.

  Coming from the second floor, Wisdom Poole and Sargeant Person see no one. They enter the schoolroom where light pours through the windows. They search behind desks pushed to the wall even though it is clear nobody, even a child, is small enough to hide there.

  Down below under long slow beams of a Black & Decker, Steward, Deek and K.D. observe defilement and violence and perversions beyond imagination. Lovingly drawn filth carpets the stone floor. K.D. fingers his palm cross. Deek taps his shirt pocket where sunglasses are tucked. He had thought he might use them for other purposes, but he wonders if he needs them now to shield from his sight this sea of depravity beckoning below. None dares step on it. More than justified in their expectations, they turn around and climb the stairs. The schoolroom door is wide open; Sargeant and Wisdom motion them in. Bunched at the windows, all five understand: the women are not hiding. They are loose.

  Shortly after the men have left Sargeant’s place, the citizens of Ruby arrive at the Oven. The rain is slowing. The trash barrel swirls with debris. The stream has crested but doesn’t overflow its banks. It seeps underground instead. Rain cascading off the Oven’s head meets mud speckled with grout flakes washed away from bricks. The Oven shifts, just slightly, on one side. The impacted ground on which it rests is undermined. In trucks and cars the citizens go to meet the men.

  Neither of the sisters needs persuading, for both have known something awful was happening. Dovey asks Soane to drive. Each is silent with loud, rocketing thoughts. Dovey has watched her husband destroy something in himself for thirty years. The more he gained, the less he became. Now he may be ruining everything. Had twenty-five years of rampant success confused him? Did he think that because they lived away from white law they were beyond it? Of course, no one could ask for a more doting husband and as long as she ignored the unknowable parts, their marriage seemed perfect. Still, she misses the little foreclosed house where her Friend visited. Only once since K.D. took it over has he come to her and that was in a dream where he was moving away from her. She called; he turned. Next thing she knew, she was washing his hair. She woke, puzzled, but pleased to see that her hands were wet from the suds.

  Soane is chastising herself for not having talked, just talked, to Deek. Told him she knew about Connie; that the loss of their third child was a judgment against her—not him. After Connie saved Scout’s life, Soane’s resentment against her evaporated and, because the two of them had become fast friends, she believed she had forgiven Deek also. Now she wondered whether her fear of suffocating in air too thin for breathing, her unrelieved mourning for her sons, keeping the ache alive by refusing to read their last letters were ways of punishing him without seeming to. In any case, she was certain that routing the Convent women had something to do with their marriage. Harper, Sargeant and certainly Arnold wouldn’t lift a hand to those women if Deek and Steward had not authorized and manipulated them. If only she had talked twenty-two years ago. Just talked.

  “What do you think?” Dovey broke the silence.

  “I can’t.”

  “They wouldn’t hurt them, would they?”

  Soane cut off the wipers. There was no need for them now. “No,” she answered. “Just scare them. Into leaving, I mean.”

  “People talk about them all the time, though. Like they were…slime.”

  “They’re different is all.”

  “I know, but that’s been enough before.”

  “These are women, Dovey. Just women.”

  “Whores, though, and strange too.”

  “Dovey!”

  “That’s what Steward says, and if he believes it—”

  “I don’t care if they’re—” Soane couldn’t imagine worse. Both became quiet.

  “Lone said K.D. is out there.”

  “He would be.”

  “You think Mable knows? Or Priscilla?” asks Dovey.

  “Doubt it. Hadn’t been for Lone, would we?”

  “It’ll be all right, I guess. Aaron and Pious will stop them. And the Beauchamps. Even Steward won’t mess with Luther.”

  The sisters laughed then, small hopeful laughs, soothing themselves as they sped through glorious dawn air.

  Consolata wakes. Seconds earlier she thought she heard footsteps descending. She assumed it was Pallas coming to nurse the baby lying beside her. She touches the diaper to see if a change is needed. Something. Something. Consolata goes chill. Opening the door she hears retreating steps too heavy, too many for a woman. She considers whether or not to disturb the baby’s sleep. Then, quickly slipping on a dress, blue with a white collar, she decides to leave the child on the cot. She climbs the stairs and sees immediately a shape lying in the foyer. She runs to it and cradles the woman in her arms, smearing her cheek and the left side of her dress with blood. The pulse at the neck is there but not strong; the breathing is shallow. Consolata rubs the fuzz on the woman’s head and begins to step in, deep, deeper to find the pinpoint of light. Shots ring from the next room.

  Men are firing through the window at three women running through clover and Scotch broom. Consolata enters, bellowing, “No!”

  The men turn.

  Consolata narrows her gaze against the sun, then lifts it as though distracted by something high above the heads of the men. “You’re back,” she says, and smiles.

  Deacon Morgan needs the sunglasses, but they are nestled in his shirt pocket. He looks at Consolata and sees in her eyes what has been drained from them and from himself as well. There is blood near her lips. It takes his breath away. He lifts his hand to halt his brother’s and discovers who, between them, is the stronger man. The bullet enters her forehead.

  Dovey is screaming. Soane is staring.

  “This dying may take a while.” Lone is desperate for Doublemint as she stanches the white woman’s wound. She and Ren have carried her to the sofa in the game room. Lone can’t hear a heartbeat, and although the neck pulse seems still to be there, too much blood has left this woman with wrists small as a child’s.

  “Has anybody gone for Roger?” she shouts.

  “Yes,” somebody shouts back.

  The noise outside the room is giving her a headache along with a fierce desire to chew. Lone leaves the woman to see what is being done t
o salvage a life or two from the mess.

  Dovey is weeping on the stairs.

  “Dovey, you have to shut up now. I need a thinking woman. Come in here and get some water; try to get that girl in there to drink it.” She drags her toward the kitchen where Soane is.

  Earlier, Deacon Morgan had carried Consolata into the kitchen, holding her in his arms for the time it took the women to clear the table. He laid her down carefully, as though any rough gesture might hurt her. It was after Consolata was comfortable—Soane’s raincoat folded under her head—that his hands trembled. Then he left to help with the wounded men. Menus, unable to get the knife from his shoulder, was whinnying in pain. Harper’s head was swelling, but it was Arnold Fleetwood who seemed to be suffering a concussion. And Jeff’s broken jaw and cracked wrist needed attention. Other Ruby people, stirred by the first caravan, had arrived, increasing twofold the disorder and the din. Reverend Pulliam removed the knife from Menus’ shoulder and had great difficulty trying to get both Jury men and the Fleetwoods to agree to go to the Demby hospital. A message came from Deed Sands’ son that Roger’s return from Middleton was expected this morning, and soon as he got back his daughter would send him along. Pulliam was finally persuasive and drove the hurt men away.

  Male voices continued to boom. Between loud accusations and sullen if quieter defense, under the onslaught of questions and prophecies of doom, it was a half hour or so before anyone thought to ask what had happened to the other women. When Pious did, Sargeant indicated “out there” with a head motion.

  “Run off? To the sheriff?”

  “Doubt that.”

  “What, man?”

  “They went down. In the grass.”

  “You all massacred those women? For what?”

  “Now we got white law on us as well as damnation!”

  “We didn’t come here to kill anybody. Look what they did to Menus and Fleet. It was self-defense!”

  Aaron Poole looked at K.D. who had offered that explanation. “You come in their house and don’t expect them to fight you?” The contempt in his eyes was clear but not as chilling as Luther’s.

  “Who had the guns?” asked Luther.

  “We all did, but it was Uncle Steward who—”

  Steward slapped him full in the mouth, and had it not been for Simon Cary, another massacre might have taken place. “Hold that man!” shouted Reverend Cary and, pointing to K.D., “You in trouble, son.”

  Pious banged his fist on the wall. “You have already dishonored us. Now you going to destroy us? What manner of evil is in you?” He had been looking at Steward, but now his gaze took in Wisdom, Sargeant and the other two.

  “The evil is in this house,” said Steward. “Go down in that cellar and see for yourself.”

  “My brother is lying. This is our doing. Ours alone. And we bear the responsibility.”

  For the first time in twenty-one years the twins looked each other dead in the eyes.

  Meanwhile Soane and Lone DuPres close the two pale eyes but can do nothing about the third one, wet and lidless, in between.

  “She said, ‘Divine,’” Soane whispers.

  “What?” Lone is trying to organize a sheet to cover the body.

  “When I went to her. Right after Steward…I held her head and she said, ‘Divine.’ Then something like ‘He’s divine he’s sleeping divine.’ Dreaming, I guess.”

  “Well, she was shot in the head, Soane.”

  “What do you think she saw?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s a sweet thought even if it was her last.”

  Dovey comes in, saying, “She’s gone.”

  “You sure?” asks Lone.

  “Go look for yourself.”

  “I will.”

  The sisters cover Consolata with the sheet.

  “I didn’t know her as well as you,” Dovey says.

  “I loved her. As God is my witness I did, but nobody knew her really.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “They? You mean ‘he,’ don’t you? Steward killed her. Not Deek.”

  “You make it sound as though it’s all his fault.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Then what? What did you mean?”

  Soane does not know what she means, other than how to locate a sliver of soap to clean away any little taint she can. But it is an exchange that alters their relationship irrevocably.

  Bewildered, angry, sad, frightened people pile into cars, making their way back to children, livestock, fields, household chores and uncertainty. How hard they had worked for this place; how far away they once were from the terribleness they have just witnessed. How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?

  Lone has said she would stay with the bodies until Roger got there. Melinda asks, “How will you get back? Your car is out at our place.”

  Lone sighs. “Well, the dead don’t move. And Roger’s got a lot of work to do.” As the car pulls away, Lone looks back at the house. “A lot of work.”

  He had none. When Roger Best got back to Ruby, he didn’t even change his clothes. He gunned the motor of the ambulance/hearse and sped to the Convent. Three women were down in the grass, he’d been told. One in the kitchen. Another across the hall. He searched everywhere. Every inch of grass, every patch of Scotch broom. The henhouse. The garden. Every row of corn in the field beyond. Then every room: the chapel, the schoolroom. The game room was empty; the kitchen too—a sheet and a folded raincoat on the table the only sign that a body had been there. Upstairs he looked in both bathrooms, in all eight bedrooms. Again the kitchen, the pantry. Then he went down into the cellar, stepped over the floor paintings. He opened one door that revealed a coal bin. Behind another a small bed and a pair of shiny shoes on the dresser. No bodies. Nothing. Even the Cadillac was gone.

  SAVE-MARIE

  “This is why we are here: in this single moment of aching sadness—in contemplating the short life and the unacceptable, incomprehensible death of a child—we confirm, defer or lose our faith. Here in the tick tock of this moment, in this place all our questions, all our fear, our outrage, confusion, desolation seem to merge, snatch away the earth and we feel as though we are falling. Here, we might say, it is time to halt, to linger this one time and reject platitudes about sparrows falling under His eye; about the good dying young (this child didn’t have a choice about being good); or about death being the only democracy. This is the time to ask the questions that are really on our minds. Who could do this to a child? Who could permit this for a child? And why?”

  Sweetie Fleetwood wouldn’t discuss it. Her child would not be laid to rest on Steward Morgan’s land. It was a brand-new problem: the subject of burial sites had not come up in Ruby for twenty years, and there was astonishment as well as sadness when the task became necessary. When Save-Marie, the youngest of Sweetie and Jeff’s children, died, people assumed the rest of them, Noah, Esther and Ming, would quickly follow. The first was given a strong name for a strong son as well as being the name of his great-grandfather. The second was named Esther for the great-grandmother who loved and cared for the first so selflessly. The third had a name Jeff insisted upon—something having to do with the war. This last child’s name was a request (or a lament): Save-Marie, and who was to say whether the call had not been answered. Thus the tense discussion of a formal cemetery was not only because of Sweetie’s wishes and the expectation of more funerals, but out of a sense that, for complicated reasons, the reaper was no longer barred entry from Ruby. Richard Misner was therefore presiding over consecrated ground and launching a new institution. But whether to use the ad hoc cemetery on Steward’s ranch—where Ruby Smith lay—was a question out of the question for Sweetie. Under the influence of her brother, Luther, and blaming Steward for the trouble he got her husband and father-in-law into, she said she would rather do what Roger Best had done (dug a grave on his own property), and she couldn’t care less that twenty-three years had passed sinc
e that quick and poorly attended backyard burial took place.

  Most people understood why she was making such a fuss (grief plus blame was a heady brew) but Pat Best believed that Sweetie’s stubbornness was more calculated. Rejecting a Morgan offer, casting doubt on Morgan righteousness might squeeze some favors from Morgan pockets. And if Pat’s 8-rock theory was correct, Sweetie’s vindictiveness put the 8-rocks in the awkward position of deciding to have a real and formal cemetery in a town full of immortals. Something seismic had happened since July. So here they were, under a soapy sky on a mild November day, gathered a mile or so beyond the last Ruby house, which was, of course, Morgan land, but nobody had the heart to tell Sweetie so. Standing among the crowd surrounding the bereaved Fleetwoods, Pat regained something close to stability. Earlier, at the funeral service, the absence of a eulogy had made her cry. Now she was her familiar, dispassionately amused self. At least she hoped she was dispassionate, and hoped amusement was what she was feeling. She knew there were other views about her attitude, some of which Richard Misner had expressed (“Sad. Sad and cold”), but she was a scholar, not a romantic, and steeled herself against Misner’s graveside words to observe the mourners instead.

  He and Anna Flood had returned two days after the assault on the Convent women, and it took four days for him to learn what had happened. Pat gave him the two editions of the official story: One, that nine men had gone to talk to and persuade the Convent women to leave or mend their ways; there had been a fight; the women took other shapes and disappeared into thin air. And two (the Fleetwood Jury version), that five men had gone to evict the women; that four others—the authors—had gone to restrain or stop them; these four were attacked by the women but had succeeded in driving them out, and they took off in their Cadillac; but unfortunately, some of the five had lost their heads and killed the old woman. Pat left Richard to choose for himself which rendition he preferred. What she withheld from him was her own: that nine 8-rocks murdered five harmless women (a) because the women were impure (not 8-rock); (b) because the women were unholy (fornicators at the least, abortionists at most); and (c) because they could—which was what being an 8-rock meant to them and was also what the “deal” required.