The Sweetest Fruits

by Monique Truong

  Charlotte remembered seeing her mother whipped by a white man who had the face of a boy—wasn’t even grown enough to have a full beard, she remembered. Her mother locked eyes with Charlotte and told her, clear as if she’d spoken the words aloud, to stay where she was. Don’t move toward me, my child. This will pass. Charlotte stayed where she was, but she lost the use of her ears for the first time. The whip hitting her mother’s back and cutting through became a mute. Her mother’s lips continued to move, but Charlotte heard something akin to silence. Charlotte floated above herself and her mother, but she didn’t know at such a young age that she should float away, head northward, into the gathering clouds. After the whip left, her mother hugged her but told Charlotte to keep her arms to her sides. Don’t touch my back, my child. This too shall pass.

  Mattie, was this Charlotte’s mother or was it yours, Pat wanted to know.

  “Charlotte’s,” I replied, “but to the whip, she was no one’s mother, Pat.”

  Charlotte learned her first lesson of lesser when she was five. Pat learned his lesson at two tens and five.

  Yes, the dismissal from the Enquirer was a surprise to Pat. It wasn’t to me, but you didn’t ask that, Miss.

  Pat slept all of the following day. I brought him his meals, though he claimed no hunger pangs. The next day he did the same and the next. On the fourth day, I went to the whiskey-shop myself to pay off his tab and to collect his belongings. I didn’t want Pat’s pens and pipes ending up in a pawnshop.

  I knew where to go, Miss, because Pat was, in many ways, a very good storyteller. Pat’s stories were as good as maps. The ones about his first days in Cincinnati were often set in a whiskey-shop at the border of the Levee and Sausage Row.

  I knew to look for some trees in the front that Pat had described as looking half-starved, a sagging porch—but that could have been any of the buildings there—and a barkeep who kept a crow by his side that sounded like a colored man laughing.

  The amount that the barkeep and the crow wanted sounded higher to me than the tab for one man, even if Pat had made a full day’s effort at drinking. The barkeep called him “Mr. Lafcadio” and claimed that Mr. Lafcadio had also bought rounds for others that day.

  Yes, he was a Negro barkeep, Miss. His crow was colored too, if you want to write that down.

  The barkeep asked, “Are you Pat’s new woman?”

  “I’m his wife,” I replied.

  The crow at the barkeep’s side laughed, and he hushed it by lightly touching the top of its sleek head.

  The barkeep’s face still wore a pinched look, but the hard gleam in his eyes had gone away. “Mr. Lafcadio’s tab is high,” he explained, “because there are drinks from the past month on it too. Mr. Lafcadio, he comes in and sometimes he has money and sometimes he doesn’t. I serve him no matter what because he’s been coming in here for years.”

  I paid Pat’s tab with the food money for the week, all of it.

  The barkeep counted out the money for me, Miss.

  You’re right. He could have cheated me, and he could have lied to me about Pat’s comings and goings too.

  Cheaters and liars looked away when doing their business is what I’ve learned. He looked me in the eyes. Better still, he looked me in the eyes like I reminded him of someone he knew. So I believed him. If I hadn’t, I would have asked Charlotte to send over Mr. Cleneay and his brothers to settle the sum for me.

  There’s more than one way to arrive at the truth, Miss.

  I gave the barkeep my promise that I would return the next day with the rest of what Mr. Lafcadio owed him. He then handed over Pat’s belongings, and the crow laughed as I walked out into the midday light.

  Pat didn’t even look at his belongings when I placed them by the bedside. He opened his eye for a moment when I’d entered the room, and then he closed it again.

  The whole of Pat was a closed eye for days to come.

  Then one morning I awoke and he was already dressed, shaved, and hungry for his breakfast. Riffling through his papers and notebooks that had sat unmoved for weeks, he asked whether I had brought everything home.

  “What are you looking for, Pat?”

  The notebook with the article ideas, he replied, and then he found it lying on top of the pile.

  With a cup of tea and four griddle cakes in him, Pat left the house that morning with the notebook in hand. He didn’t say where he was going, and I worried that he was returning to the Enquirer to try to get his job back. Fool’s errand, I would have told him. Another lesson of lesser was that there were no second chances.

  But Pat wasn’t a lesser. He was only married to one.

  Pat came home that evening with a job, not with the Enquirer but with the Commercial, Miss Caroline’s newspaper of choice. He’d even received his first week’s pay in advance, which he handed over to me. I don’t know if it was all of it, but it was more than ever before. Pat hadn’t asked how I’d made do, but he must have known that there couldn’t have been any fresh meat, milk, eggs, or butter for Bill and me while he was away. “Away” was what he called the weeks that he had remained in bed. I’ve never been away, because no matter what happened—no matter what lessons I’d learned—I would have to be up again before dawn.

  When you’ve been taught that you are lesser, there was another way to empty yourself of anger, the stubborn kind, the kind closer to shame. It was cheaper than drink, but it cost those around you more. I didn’t tell Pat about this other way. He came to it on his own.

  Pat from the start kept an even longer workday at the Commercial. He was proving his worth to his new master, I told myself.

  Yes, Miss, I meant his new employer. I misspoke.

  Pat began by taking his notebook of ideas and writing them all up for the Commercial. He even wrote a story about me.

  Can you imagine that, Miss?

  Cobbling together the stories that Aunt Sweetie had told me and that I had told him, Pat wrote that a reporter—at the Commercial Pat didn’t have a byline either, at first—sat on the kitchen stairs of a boardinghouse while its cook—a healthy, well-built country girl, good-looking, robust, and ruddy—shared with him ghost-people stories.

  Pat didn’t mention me by name or Mrs. Haslam’s, but if you read that story now you would know, Miss.

  Salee Plantation was in there too, but Pat didn’t mention its name either, only that it was between Augusta and Dover. He called it a farm instead of a plantation, which I didn’t tell him was wrong when he read the story aloud to me. He included its apple orchard, elder-brushes, and the owls that lived in its beech and sugar trees, but what he described as its farmhouse he took from another story, one that was set in the place where Aunt Sweetie had lived when she was young. Pat said that Aunt Sweetie’s farmhouse was more aspic.

  Yes, that sounds more like Pat’s word, Miss. The farmhouse was more atmospheric.

  Pat even wrote Mr. Bean into the story. Well, only his name. I hadn’t been able to recall the true name of the queer old man who Aunt Sweetie said had invited his neighbors over for a fancy supper and served them a giant black snake, prepared as if it were a poached fish. Like I said, Pat took from this story and borrowed from that one, until even I couldn’t remember where anything had once belonged. Pat assured me that if the story made their skin crawl, then the readers wouldn’t care one bit whether the old man’s name was really “Mr. Bean” or not. Pat didn’t venture whether Mr. Bean himself would care.

  “Are you saying the snake is the heart, Pat?” I asked.

  The way that the snake can creep underneath the readers’ skin, Mattie, is the heart, he replied.

  Once Pat began at the Commercial, my own workday also had to change. Pat now came home for dinner and returned to the newsroom again, until the early hours of the following day. Serving Pat a noonday meal meant setting the bread dough to rise the morning before. Yeasted bread, he
told me, was also required at the dinner table. It meant an early walk to the beef butcher instead of a morning visit with Charlotte at her house. It meant—

  But you didn’t come to hear about my day, did you, Miss? Well, maybe you’ll want to write this down.

  Pat was becoming another man. The change began with his stomach. He was hungry, but he couldn’t tell me what for. His words left him when he sat down at our table. Pat would survey what was on his plate and then pick up his knife and fork, as if they were too heavy in his hands.

  Each meal that he ate in this way was a stab in my side.

  I asked Charlotte if she knew of other ways of preparing beef.

  “Yes. Add some pork to it,” she teased, and then she called her gal Lucy out of the kitchen—Lucy was from the state of Indiana—to see if they prepared beef any differently there. They didn’t.

  When Pat found his words again, I wished that he hadn’t.

  It wasn’t the beef that displeased him. It was the onions. He complained that I didn’t use enough of them in my cooking. Then it was the lard. He said that I used too much of it, and all he could taste was the animal and not the summer squash, the lima beans, or the turnip greens. Then it was the wine. When Pat said “wine,” he meant grape and not blackberry or strawberry wine. He claimed that the people of France used it in their cooking and that it made their dishes romantic. No, he said it made their dishes aromatic.

  I’d no idea where to buy grape wine, and I told Pat so. He looked at me as if he were seeing right through me. Later that afternoon, a delivery boy came to the house with a bottle, and I stared at it, an oyster that I didn’t know how to shuck. I brought the bottle over to Charlotte, and she said that Mr. Cleneay would open it for me when he got home that evening or if I couldn’t wait, then I would have to go see him at his shop. I went over to Cleneay Brothers, and Mr. Cleneay broke the wax seal and slid the thin edge of a small carving knife around the stopper, jiggling it up and out.

  “Are you planning to drink this entire bottle of claret on your own, Alethea?” the butcher asked with a wink.

  “I’m going to cook with it, Mr. Cleneay,” I replied.

  “You don’t have to be so formal around me, Alethea,” the butcher said.

  “I believe I do, Mr. Cleneay. Your wife would think so too.”

  “You know her better than I do, Alethea,” the butcher said.

  “Mr. Cleneay?”

  “Yes, Alethea.”

  “What am I to do with this grape wine?”

  “You said that you’re going to cook with it, Alethea.”

  “I don’t know how,” I confessed. I hadn’t intended to, but the way that he kept on saying my name made me feel as if I could.

  “This is a strong red wine, Alethea. You’ll have to get a cut of beef,” the butcher advised.

  “I was going to, Mr. Cleneay.”

  “I’m not a cook, Alethea.”

  “I know that, Mr. Cleneay.”

  “I would add it to the cooking liquids, Alethea.”

  “You mean instead of stock?”

  “I’m not certain, Alethea.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cleneay.”

  “I’m happy to be at your service, Alethea. I’ve missed seeing you in the shop,” the butcher said. “Your face brightens the day,” he added.

  “Mr. Hearn prefers beef,” I explained.

  “There’s no accounting for taste,” said the butcher, with another wink.

  Mr. Cleneay was right. He wasn’t a cook. Otherwise, he would have told me not to use the entire bottle.

  The stew smelled like a drunk and tasted like vinegar. After one bite, Pat took his plate into the kitchen and scraped its contents into the bin. I’d even placed a sprig of parsley, wilting on the edge of that plate, and it landed on top of the heap, like a curly green bow. Pat left the house without saying a word to me.

  I sat in the kitchen for a long while, after hearing the front door opened and shut. I watched the sunlight coming through the yellow-and-white gingham curtains that I’d sewn for the kitchen windows. I watched that light touch the tin kettle, the cast-iron pot and frying skillet, the wooden rolling pin and long-handled spoons, the knives, the blue-and-white dishes and bowls, their matching cups and saucers—I’d asked Pat for four of each, in case he invited someone over for supper, which he never did—and the serving platter with two pink cabbage roses at its center. I’d thought of them as belonging to me, but they all belonged to Pat now. He’d taken away my kitchen. He’d been doing it for months and months with his remarks. He completed the task that day. The slop in the bin was proof that I was no longer a cook. If I wasn’t a cook, I was no one.

  Pat had figured it out on his own.

  If you make the one dearest to you feel lesser than you, then the anger empties out of you, like pus and blood. You think it will make you heal, make you whole again, but it won’t. I’d seen it tried before. Molly had as well. So had Aunt Sweetie, Charlotte, Mr. Cleneay, his brothers. Bill would see it too.

  I need a witness.

  It startled me. It made me look around the kitchen to find the other woman, the one who must have thought it.

  I need a witness.

  It wouldn’t go away. It stayed in the house with me and Bill, and days later when Pat came home it shouted at me.

  I need a witness.

  No, I don’t know where Pat had spent those nights, Miss.

  I didn’t stop hearing it until we were on the train headed to Indianapolis.

  Bill and I, we were the ones who left first, Miss. But we were also the ones who came back. Pat was the one who would leave and never return.

  No, I didn’t hear voices, Miss.

  They’ll have me put away, if you write that. If I were you, I wouldn’t put that in the Enquirer. A reporter is only as believable as her source, isn’t that right, Miss?

  Yes, Pat did teach me that, Miss.

  Should I go on? Or do you have more questions about how I hear voices?

  As I was saying, Bill and I, we went to Indianapolis. Charlotte’s gal, Lucy, had kin there. Her aunt and uncle had a room to let, and the room wasn’t in Kentucky was all that I needed to hear. I would never take Bill into that state. Charlotte lent me the money for the train fare, and Mr. Cleneay gave me spending money, more bills than I’d ever seen at one time, wrapped in a bit of butcher paper, when he saw Bill and me off at the station. Charlotte hadn’t accompanied us because she was with child again, her third, and for the first time she was suffering from the morning sickness. She rued that it must be a girl this time.

  “Girls are trouble waiting to be born,” Charlotte had said, laughing low. “Come back to Cincinnati and meet her, Alethea,” she added with a smile that said she couldn’t wait to meet her daughter.

  At the train station, Mr. Cleneay also asked me to come back.

  “I intend to,” I replied. “I never had plans to be anywhere else but right here, Mr. Cleneay.”

  What I didn’t say was why I had to go away.

  Pat wasn’t himself these days, and I wasn’t myself either.

  Well, that’s not all true.

  Before Bill and I left, Pat was so rarely at home that I went back to cooking how I’d always cooked. Bill and I, we ate biscuits and hot water cornbread with whatever meal we wanted. We ate pork again too, as often as possible, making up for lost meals. I saw Mr. Cleneay nearly every day then. He would set aside two chops for Bill and me or, my favorite, a heap of neck bones.

  “Mr. Hearn changed his mind about the pig?” the butcher had asked, his face aglow, when I started coming in again.

  “No, Mr. Cleneay. Mr. Hearn doesn’t change his mind,” I replied.

  “There must be a reason that brings you back in, Alethea. I’m guessing it’s Bill. He’s a growing boy, and growing boys need pork on their plate,” the bu
tcher said.

  “I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Cleneay.”

  “It’s sure good to see you smile again, Alethea.”

  It was true that Bill at eight was growing tall and smart as a dandy—

  Yes, I know the common saying is “smart as a whip,” Miss.

  Bill was learning his letters at school, and he took to Pat’s books like a bee to honey.

  See, Miss? That’s a common saying too. I’m from here, Miss.

  The books were what Bill would miss the most. He could only read some of the words then, and the rest he skipped, like a stone over water. He never lost a taste for reading. He had Mr. Pat to thank for it, Bill would later say.

  When we were packing for Indianapolis, I told Bill that we would be traveling light. He asked whether he could bring along some of Mr. Pat’s books. I said he could choose one. He chose the thickest one he could find. Bill was sharp as a dandy, as I said.

  I asked him what the book was about, and he read the title to me, The Complete Myths of Ancient Greece.

  “Greece is where Mr. Pat was born,” I told him, though I knew that wasn’t the full story of Pat’s island.

  Bill’s eyes opened wide. He carried that book to Indianapolis and back, that’s for sure. He still has it too.

  A drawing wasn’t going to tell Pat what I needed him to know, so I asked Mr. Cleneay to write some words on my behalf.

  “Please give Mr. Hearn the address of Lucy’s people in Indianapolis,” I said.

  “Are you certain, Alethea?” the butcher asked.

  “He’s my husband, Mr. Cleneay. He should know where he can find me.”

  “Is that all, Alethea?”

  “Yes, that’s all, Mr. Cleneay.”

  That wasn’t all, but that was all that I could say in front of Mr. Cleneay.

  Pat was a writer, so I thought he would write to me. That an envelope would arrive and within it a dove and a raven, their heads bending toward each other. Pat had the means, so I thought that he would buy a train ticket to Indianapolis and knock on Lucy’s aunt and uncle’s door, his traveling case left behind in Cincinnati, because he was there just to escort me and Bill back home. Pat was still my husband, so I thought that I was still his wife.