“But ma’am!” he protested. “This here’s barely done.”
“It’s okay, Jesse,” she said. “Floyd needs you too. He insists you be back early.”
And with this the division was drawn, as the next day Jesse came sneaking around the house in hopes the Missus would see him. And even though she did, she spoke not a word and allowed him to leave without ever knowing of her presence. When Floyd asked him where he’d been, the boy lied and said he’d gone out back for some water. Next day I caught him again poking around the bushes near the front porch when he thought no one was looking, telling me he’d wanted to see if there was landscaping that needed to be done because a handful of workers had finished their jobs and could use some more work.
“How about you worry about your own self, Jesse,” I told him. “I see what you’re doing and I don’t like it one bit. If there was work to be done then you’d know it because you’d be doing it.”
The boy smiled, still looking toward the main house just past my shoulder. He then laughed playfully, asking, “The Missus complained about the kitchen being in such shambles?”
“No, son,” I told him honestly. “The Missus ain’t seen the insides of that kitchen since you last saw it. She couldn’t tell you what color it was if you asked her today.”
Jesse laughed, still defiant as ever, although the brunt of his defiance was saved for Silva when she discovered him one day circling the kitchen door at the height of the workday.
“Jesse, you done lost your ever-loving mind!” Silva said.
Her body trembled to a feverish pitch as the folds along her neck released their sweat.
He stood up tall to her, saying, “Miss Lula wanted me to finish the job, but Floyd won’t let me, wanna keep me out there with him all day when I can do both.”
“Floyd can’t stop Miss Lula from doing a damn thing!” Silva insisted. “If she want you here, you’d be here.”
“Floyd just wanna keep me out the house,” he pouted. “Want me to work out there with him forever like I ain’t got a brain.”
“You ain’t got what the Good Lord gave you if you expect me to believe that. Floyd ain’t the master of this house. Now, you know better, Jesse.”
The worst of his contempt, however, was said in private, my ear just happening upon those words as I drifted past the garden. Silva accused the boy of being a silly nigga, and he rushed off with his chest puffed up.
“I ain’t no nigga!” he shouted back.
“You ain’t no man either,” she said.
“I am a man,” he said quietly, these words uttered more for his own acknowledgment than anyone else.
“Then be one,” she said. “You are what you do, Jesse.”
“I work harder than any worker out here,” he said.
“And if the Missus wants to bring you in, she will,” she replied. “But you can’t makes her.”
I overheard them continue their arguing and name calling in hushed tones out by the back porch, when by a slip of my eye I spotted Miss Lula at her upstairs window, her hair at her shoulders and her eyes looking down, her cheeks a faint color that blushed and made her complexion appear alive and fervent.
CHAPTER 11
“I’m going!” Jesse fussed to Floyd one day following that argument with his mother, insisting that the Missus had sent for him despite Floyd’s claims that she hadn’t.
Just before noon, Jesse charged out over the rye grass, those wilting greens that had grown a solid foot after the rains and now reached the heights of the fescues that grew down by the Yazoo River. When he’d made it to the main house, the Missus awaited him, having taken her seat on that porch with her needlework in hand every day since observing the boy’s disagreement with Silva, knowing he’d be coming sooner or later.
“Jesse!” she said, feigning a sense of surprise.
“Yes, Miss,” he said. “Floyd give me permission to finish.”
I cut him a stern look, but he turned away.
“I don’t know,” Miss Lula said, watching both our faces. “There’s lots a work out there, and this house don’t run on decorative wishes. We cotton people. Always have been. Always will be.”
“I can do both if you like,” he said. “I just thought you want it finished. Mr. Kern said it’d make you happy.”
A lie if I’d ever heard one.
“You’re an angel,” she praised. “But work outside comes first, then you can help in here.”
“Yes, Miss,” he accepted.
“And no more running off without telling anyone,” she said. “I heard about you coming to the house without Floyd’s permission. You come when you want now. You have my permission as long as your work is done.”
Jesse smiled at these words, returning to the fields that day with a weightlessness about him, his arms swaying freely and his legs lifting his body some ten inches above the ground. He would make amends with Floyd, yet each time the boy left for the house the wound would grow deeper.
After that encounter, Jesse found himself at the house every day that summer. Silva and I did our best to rearrange the results of Jesse’s work, returning the house to some semblance of a home before Mr. Kern sat down for dinner, or at least shading parts of the boy’s destruction as much as possible until Jesse returned on the next day or the next to finish it. However, it seemed that once Jesse was inside the house, the Missus forgot about him. He was only noticed by Mr. Kern, who’d spot a nail on the floor and howl. He’d look toward his usual sights at dinner to find them covered in plastic and ram his hands so forcibly that it shook the paintings from the wall.
The Missus’s fickle mood was not surprising as she had family visiting from Little Rock, who had arrived the morning of Jesse’s first week inside the home. Blindness could have provided more sight than those skewed headlights outside the car window as Floyd waved the family in just before the stroke of dawn.
“Let me take you to your rooms,” I said as they emerged sleepily from the vehicle. “I know you dying for some rest after that long drive.”
“Just the little ones,” a stout woman said, mean as ever.
The three boys followed me inside as the woman and her husband met Miss Lula on the front porch. Miss Lula gave the boys kisses before leaving them to follow me to their bedrooms, the smallest one just barely making it as he fell asleep in midstride, requiring that I carry him and place him into his bed or else he would sleep right there on the hallway floor. The other two were not so easy, the middle one insisting that he have his own room and the oldest child demanding the same, although less adamantly.
“I don’t have to listen to you!” the middle one shouted. “I’ll tell my mama.”
“And I’ll tell Miss Lula,” I replied. “She told me to have you boys sleep here. Now be a good boy and get to bed.”
“Aunt Sissy don’t control me,” the middle one spat just as mean as he could. “We control her.”
Either unable or unwilling to continue this fight, the older boy hesitantly obliged, leaving the middle child to continue his grief just long enough for that heaviness of sleep and a long journey to finally settle as he climbed into his bed with a fading insistence that he have his own room tomorrow.
Silva and Jesse arrived just as the family unpacked, Floyd taking Jesse to the fields right away while Silva began her work inside the kitchen. With this brief distraction, I stole off to Floyd’s quarters and closed my eyes for a minute. Dreams were never hard to summon, and this time was no different as I pictured some far-off place where Henry awaited me beside the sounds of an infinite ocean that tapped and gurgled and lobbed its soft song. Those sounds met those of our own heartbeats, as I imagined the children’s voices I heard to be those of our own. That I had nursed them to my breast and they’d known my inner touch. But still, there was something different about this place, and I saw it in the tide—the white surf a static
motion that did not reflect some endless possibility of distant lands but instead the sights I’d seen every day out here. The air was harsh and brought tears to my eyes as I became painfully aware that I was alone in the cotton and nowhere else but Greenwood.
The children’s voices came again, their footsteps racing about the stables wildly as I jumped to my feet and went to find them. John, Simon, and Matthew—mine for that weeklong period of the family’s visit while Silva managed the house and Floyd the fields, and Jesse roamed in and out unchecked and unnoticed by all who were around except the Missus, who kept tabs on us all.
CHAPTER 12
There was no way to watch the three boys and Jesse. In the evenings, I would return to the house to see some new project he’d completed or just started, his presence announced only by the work he’d done or some tools he’d left in the kitchen. One day I found him chatting with the Missus as I passed the back stables with the three boys following me like the trains of my housecoat. His eyes showed remorse when he saw me, and he ended that conversation right quickly, the Missus turning to me then sauntering off toward the house, a devil in a white dress with satin hair.
Because of those three boys and their constant energy, I couldn’t tell you which mission was more taxing. John, the oldest child at thirteen, was a smart boy, well-dressed and considerably better behaved than his middle brother, Simon, who at age eleven was a firecracker, cunning yet as simpleminded as a flea, round and plucked straight from his father’s image, his pug nose sitting proudly on his face as he often scrunched it up and poked out his tongue at whomever issued directives that were not of his choosing. Then there was Matthew, age six, a sweetheart who had not yet learned the ways of this world, too young to see or understand this society’s distinctions and, as such, was as loving toward me as he would be to his own mother.
The boys followed me during each of my duties around the farm and the back stables where I worked the cattle and kept the pen and chicken coop tidy.
“Can I do it?” John asked as we stood at the pigpen this day.
“Yeah, me too,” Simon interrupted, not waiting for my response before he’d stuck his hand into the mix of cabbage and tossed it over the fence.
John then followed, having seen his brother’s example and learning from it. Still, while John placed the food gently for the pigs to eat, Simon threw it directly at them, laughing each time they drew closer as he’d rear his arm back to get them again. He had some type of devil in him, chasing the chickens and smashing their eggs and pulling the cows’ tails when he thought no one was looking. Then his father would merely pass and laugh, that proverbial thumbs-up the boy needed to continue his rampage.
Jesse had completed the entire kitchen and dining area by the time I saw that space again. It was beautiful, adorned with framed cabinets and matching doors, as well as fresh paint in both rooms that still smelled like new. He’d built a shelf by the kitchen door that stored the Missus’s preserves and now started work inside one of the downstairs bathrooms, as she’d requested.
When I entered the house, the silence that once plagued this place when I’d first arrived had swiftly returned. Mr. Kern sat in his parlor and the Missus upstairs in her usual room, almost making me believe that these months of frantic haste and her deliverance had never occurred. If it were not for the Missus’s revived color, I would be assured that they truly hadn’t.
“Why, Miss?” I heard a voice ask from within her room, as I stood in the hallway just outside her door.
I counted the number of people inside the house. Silva remained outside with Floyd, Mr. Kern sat inside his parlor, and the Arkansas clan was gone for the afternoon. I recoiled then slipped back as a snake would when inclined to strike.
“There’s no need even thinking about it,” the Missus replied, her back to the door and the stranger’s face veered toward the window, although the shades remained drawn and the dimness in the room was nearly impossible to see through. “There’s nothing you can do about things like that. God’s will be His will sometimes.”
“But don’t you miss her?” the man said.
“Sure,” she replied. “I’d be fool not to. I think about her every day. She would be Fletcher’s age about now, ready to go off to school or get married.”
There was a sudden rustling inside the room as her voice abruptly stopped, a sound of two bodies moving amongst the darkness toward one another. And it was there, just within the outline of the window and closet door that they stood, embracing one another innocently enough to get him killed. The embrace was quick, consoling whatever tears the Missus had, for she now regained her composure and sent him from the room to continue his duties elsewhere. She sat at the window a while longer, her body a deflated shell of self-pity and wrath, her youthfulness an ever-fading casualty to that scorn that ruined her from within. She did not move for hours at a time, standing only when her guests had returned to the house and their voices reached her in that upstairs room, the boys returning with that same vigor they had charged the house with on that very first day after their rest. They rushed upstairs with gifts to place at the Missus’s bedside, for it was indeed her birthday.
The boys then found me near that upstairs window, ready to once again race the fields. The three of them leapt wildly while my gait trailed slowly behind. They turned a deaf ear to any heeding to be careful when climbing the fences that had just received new posts, that might insist they not go so high when swinging from branches of the tallest magnolias. Floyd found us just as we neared the white heads of his cotton fields, the boys using this bit of distraction to rush along those patches as Floyd pulled me aside.
“I ain’t seen him all day,” he said. “Guess he been workin’ at the house?”
“He’s been there, but I can’t say he’s been working,” I said.
“What d’ya mean?” Floyd asked.
“Missus had him in her room talking as usual,” I said.
“Talkin’ ’bout what?” Floyd insisted. “That boy ain’t said a wise word since I’d know’d ’im.”
“Missus got him in there talking about Elizabeth,” I said. “All types of things.”
“If I hears that name one more time …” Floyd shouted, “I swear that child in heaven just beggin’ ta be left alone. Wanna live out the rest of her days in peace, not draggin’ up the dead. Been fourteen years an’ she still can’t rest. Listenin’ to those carrying on down here.”
Floyd stamped his foot, which sent dust to both our eyes.
“I’ll have words for him,” he said. “Lest he forget …”
The children rushed back with guilty looks on their faces, the smallest one holding his knee, which was bruised, although the other two would not say how it happened. I marched them inside with the little one over my shoulder, Floyd taking to finding Jesse and scolding him good.
Although it was the Missus’s birthday, not even that occasion could bring a smile to her face. As Floyd put it, not even the second coming could seemingly lift her mood. Her family was to depart Greenwood that evening, the little ones having their final go at wreaking havoc on this place as they ran past the kitchen window screaming while Silva prepared the cake inside with the help of the youngest boy, who piped icing messily.
When this was done we all sat down to eat, the little ones, their mother and father, the Missus and Mister, and Silva and myself.
“I sure hates to eat and leave,” the boys’ father said. “Way things going back home, make you wanna stay in places like this, where people make sense.”
The stout woman smiled and nodded her head in agreement, a mass of blue icing in piles at the sides of her mouth.
“Scott will tell you,” she said. “He know’d a man who owned his shop for fifty years. Folks come along one day and wanna show him how to do it. I tell you, ain’t no place the same. But I’m sure you’ve got your own problems down here, too. Ain’t nothing perfe
ct no more.”
“It’s all these damn excuses!” the boys’ father shouted. “Been one way forever, ain’t nobody complaining till now. Ask Sissy, she’ll tell you.”
The stout woman turned to Miss Lula who sat quietly beside Mr. Kern, the old man never looking up from his half-eaten plate a minute during the meal.
“Sissy done run a good home all this time,” the boys’ father continued. “Ain’t nobody crying or complaining. You get some people come in from their parts and they say you doing it wrong. Do it like this or that.”
“We all believe in doing right by our negras,” the woman said, shaking her head at Miss Lula, whose thoughts were persistently elsewhere.
The boys paid no attention to this talk, now pleading for more cake, which they received by Silva’s hand.
“You gotta chop off the head,” the boys’ father said. “Then the rest will fall.”
The stout woman nodded, licking the icing from the tips of her fork. The family sat for a short time longer while Silva and I cleaned the mess around them, and the boys played outdoors before they gathered to sing another verse of some birthday song that was familiar to only them. The family then departed, kissing Miss Lula kindly as they tried to load those unwilling boys back inside the car and pry the smallest one from my knee.
“They prolly do better takin’ this one with ’em,” Floyd said as he pointed at the Missus, who watched pitifully, her eyes cast down like some sick child kept inside on a sunny day.
This bit of juvenile madness prevailed in her as she sulked for days after their departure and indeed until the very moment she rejoined them some three weeks later in Little Rock after all of Mr. Kern’s attempts at helping her regain her mood had failed and he just gave up.
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