Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  1

  Whenever my mother writes, she asks after her roses. Has the Angèle Pernet dodged the black spot this year? Did you try an application of vinegar in the spring, as your aunt suggested? Do send pictures, if you can, Dev.

  I send pictures, which I frame to avoid the curling watermelon vines. These sprawling, gloss-green cables lounge at the feet of my mother’s prized hybrid tea roses like fat neighborhood dogs—pampered, entirely unaccountable. I avoid responding until summer is safely passed. I send a stark image of a bare frosted bush alongside an apologetic note.

  I could refuse to photograph the roses my mother has not tended in over a decade. But she misses our American house, as she calls it, and she misses me. She has remarried a respectable white gentleman with whom she has borne properly white babies. Her half-Hindu son is now—to her new family and friends—an excess best forgotten. She did not forget me. Sometimes I thought the Angèle Pernet’s persistent black spot was the only reason she remembered. And yet I considered refusing her requests.

  I did not consider destroying the watermelon.

  I did not consider photographing it.

  I came to think of those strange yellow and purple globes as tea leaves and dowsing rods. I gave them minimal care. I stayed away from the River House for weeks at a time in the summer, just as a test. But they lived, year after year, and the fruit’s yellow flesh was so sweet and fragrant it turned my stomach. I gave them to some neighborhood boys, who thanked me with wide eyes until their mothers called them back inside. Afterward, they refused to speak to me.

  She’ll come back, those vines told me. You’ll take her back. You still want her.

  I did, though for years I hated myself for it. Then I resigned myself to it. Then I killed a man so she wouldn’t have to.

  But she came back.

  * * *

  “We have aphids.”

  Pea’s tracked garden mud into the kitchen again. Bits of leaf and straw stick out of the floating mass of hair that has changed, slowly but unmistakably, over the last month. A burn from two days ago peels on her shoulders. She frowns at the curling skin and smears dirt when she picks at it. It catches me, the sight of her. I have been sitting at the kitchen table, holding myself very still, trying not to remember. Then she walks inside and the avalanche falls. The stink of shit and his gamy dumpling soup. What he called her, the curse he laid on us, the ache in my wrist as I pushed her knife into his head—

  “Dev?”

  Pea touches me. The avalanche slows and settles. I look up at her brown eyes, wide and limpid as a cow’s. She is still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

  “Aphids,” I repeat. She looks about to cry, and then wrestles it back down. A flashing truth, and when the glare fades all she leaves me is her curious smile.

  “Tiny plant-killing monsters? Sucking the lifeblood from my tomatoes?”

  “Oh, you mean the greenflies.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Is that British?”

  I smile. “Why not spray them?”

  “With what, darling?”

  She starts to lean against the table, so I intercept her muddy hands and bring them to my cheek. She winces, and then laughs. “I’m a mess, aren’t I? Sorry, Dev. I did remember the boots this time.”

  “I was very proud of you.” I reach and pluck a green corkscrew from her brown ones—a remnant of the sprawling snow pea vines she has been beating back from the damask roses. “I don’t suppose vinegar would do anything?”

  “You know, despite what your mother—”

  “It’s my aunt Rose, really—”

  “—your appropriately named aunt believes, vinegar doesn’t solve every gardening problem.”

  She kneels so her face is level with mine, and settles those lips in some hollow between my shoulder blade and neck, a perfect touch, quickly withdrawn.

  “What should we do, then?” My voice is light. Sometimes she guesses how much that costs me.

  A flush spreads from Pea’s cheeks to her ears. Neither of us moves. We’ve tried to make love only once in the past month, and even then I had to stop. Everything we say echoes forward and backward, with meanings on the surface and layered in tight folds beneath. We hear them all, but our game is to pretend that we don’t.

  No—my game. It always has been, and now my hands reach for those worn-out cards even when I know I could play it differently. When I’m at last with the woman who doesn’t need my tricks. Or not as many.

  “Evaluate the situation,” Pea says, softly. Dirt crumbles to my collar as she traces curving bone around my eye. “Seek advice. Assemble appropriate tools. Save the tomatoes.”

  “How is it you sound so dangerous even when proposing to save something?”

  Pea’s eyes get that hard look, one I used to associate with days in the Pelican. But her lips turn up and she laughs, false and knowing. “Because I was always proposing to save something, darling,” she says, and strokes me, like a punch, on the cheek.

  Killing eyes and killing hands. Only, those killing hands have spent the last three hours working the soil, and her eyes—

  I lean in and kiss her, searching for truth and finding joy, complete and evanescent. The bloom is off the rose by the time she opens her eyes. A breath hollows out my chest.

  “Let’s go to town,” she says, “to the general store. I can ask Mr. Craver.”

  Do I regret what I did for her? Taking that sin onto myself when she has so many others, so many kills? Should I blame her for it? Should I love her so much?

  That n—r bitch—

  I will hold Victor’s ugly, dying words inside me for the rest of my life. But she might not.

  “Dev?”

  I wrap my arms around her and she opens against me. “If you think that old puritan has anything useful to say, of course. We will stop the greenflies.”

  “If you call them that, no one will have any idea what you’re saying, Dev.” Her words are muffled against my shoulder.

  “Then translate, Pea.”

  * * *

  I go to check the mailbox while Pea showers. I slide lightly down the steep gravel driveway. My father meant to surface it properly for the new Chrysler he had purchased the winter we moved. Then he died, and there was the end to all that. I stayed here with Mother until I went to college, then she moved to Devon and married the younger son of a peer. I became a naturalized citizen, instead.

  A single letter sits in the box. Bright white, with a seal in the corner familiar to me from filing my draft card with the rest of the precinct. Back when I thought Victor could grease the wheels of any serious trouble. Back before I killed him.

  I am steady and sharp as one of Pea’s old knives when I leverage my thumb under the loose edge and rip along the seam. I have dreaded this for months, but I do not flinch. Our lives have taught us that much.

  ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION

  Following which arresting headline the president himself requests my presence at my local draft board at eight in the morning two weeks hence.

  Perhaps they won’t want me. My neighbors are still wary at the best of times, though they tended to tolerance for my mother’s sake. Since Pea came it’s been worse. Either one of us alone seems to occupy that liminal space between “acceptable” and “colored,” but together we are unequivocally Not White.

  We are unequivocally Not White, but one can get damned tired of it mattering. If they decide that I’m white enough to enlist—or if they ship me to one of the Negro units, like Tamara’s boyfriend—then what will I do? Ignore them? Take my chances as a conscientious objector? Kill?

  Might be it’s like that first taste of whiskey: the more you drink, the sweeter it goes down.

  I feel her searching for me before I hear her voice. A tug that starts in the web between my fingers and settles in my wrists. There’s a scent to it as well, sweet almonds and tomato leaves, the smell of how she feels but not actually how she smells. Pea always speaks of the hands as though they were
a separate entity, a spirit whom she no longer trusts. But I know that they are me, as much as any part of the meat of my body can be. I was ten when my dream came down, an ecstasy of holy voices raised in song, and of holy hands, soft as chrysanthemum petals, pushing me up and up to meet the godhead. My father sent me back to my grandmother’s farm for the year. My grandmother told me that they were a gift, a tiny spark of divine Shiva bestowed upon me for selfless deeds in a past life. They were mine, she said, but they were mine to use well.

  I have failed as thoroughly as possible the charge laid upon me. My karmic load cannot be expiated in this lifetime. What good could I do now equal to my decade of silence? To the stink and slip as another dying man cursed me, and I took it willingly, to spare my lover?

  I fold the letter into thirds and stuff it into my pocket.

  “There you are,” she calls from the top of the hill. She slides on the gravel as she jogs down and laughs as she keeps her balance. “Any mail? More advice from Mother?”

  “Neither.” I lift her hand to kiss it. “You’re clean.”

  “Dirt does wash off.”

  “Unlike—” I begin, and her smile doesn’t slip, but still I sense her anticipation as I turn her out for the spin, “the greenflies on your tomatoes.”

  “You can clean anything if you try hard enough.” She takes my elbow. We settle together into the silence that follows, a deepness strung with tension, perversely comforting. River Road is a half-hour walk, but we prefer that to the car.

  The silence keeps for more than a mile, all the way to the abandoned Lutheran church on the edge of town. It held its last Sunday service on the eve of the Depression, shortly after my father’s death. Now, only Craver seems to remember the cracked and falling stones of that old churchyard. Warped clapboard and blown-out glass is all that’s left of the second-oldest German Lutheran church in the Hudson Valley. Craver showed me, once, the plot destined for his bones, at the foot of his parents’ and grandparents’ graves. All I can remember of it now is its austerity, two thin, lichen-crusted slabs that even then seemed cowed by the surrounding vegetation.

  “They’re going to build a hotel there,” Pea says.

  “You heard that?”

  “Ellen told me.”

  I shrugged. “The Bobbys are always threatening the riverfront property on this side of town. Probably nothing will come of it.”

  “The Bobbys? You mean Mayor Bell?”

  “And his son.” I look away and start walking again. “Bobby Bell, the Junior and Senior. There’s been a Bell in the River House since the Civil War.”

  Pea shakes her head. “You’ve never mentioned the son before.”

  “No.” That would cut too close. She already knows about one of the deaths on my shoulders. No need to tell her of the other.

  A deer buck and two does graze by the fence at the northern edge of the churchyard. The buck raises its head, heavy with late-summer antlers, when we pass. I feel the heat of its attention, smell the tender grass sweetness of its curiosity and the banked charcoal of its aggression. But I don’t fear the skewering points of those antlers any more than Pea does. Not with her beside me. She pauses for a moment to meet its eyes and her look is pure Bleecker Street. The constellation of features that I would study from shadowed corners when she spoke to Victor or Walter, and that would scare me, and that I would love. A killer. I had known precisely what she was from the moment I saw her in that Hell’s Kitchen alley. It was the blood, I know that now; not despite it, but because of it.

  Pea turns from the buck and rubs her thumb across my forehead. I hadn’t known I was frowning. She observes me, but we are as incomprehensible to one another as we are to those deer by the graveyard.

  The distant report of a hunting rifle cracks our tableau. The buck and the does jump the rotting fence and vanish behind the church.

  “Is it awful to hope that no one gets venison for dinner tonight?”

  My laugh cracks the air as unexpectedly as that gun. “Only venison?”

  “It’s a sin to eat something so beautiful. Did you see his eyes?”

  “So it’s only beauty that arouses your pity?”

  “Lucky for you! Don’t make me lose all my vices. I might die from the shock.”

  “I’m using your zucchini for dinner.”

  “Are you? And what if I happened to find some steak on our way back?”

  “I would watch you cook it with a great deal of disapproval.”

  “It wouldn’t be home without it. Darling. Dev. You know I would give up meat tomorrow if you wanted—”

  I put my finger to her lips, pull us back. “Not today?”

  She closes her eyes. “Not all my vices.”

  “Nor mine.”

  It’s never far away, the smell of blood. Beneath her skin, and beneath mine. Nothing is more beautiful than what spills out of us when we have nothing else left.

  She twitches away from me. “What’s that in your pocket?” The folded envelope has shifted on our walk, so that a corner of crisp white paper pokes out. I shrug and push it back down.

  “A letter from the president,” I say.

  She laughs. “Tell him that whenever he’s finished with Hitler, I could use some help with my aphids.”

  I cant a smile at her and walk ahead. I don’t take her hand, because she would feel my pulse.

  2

  The general store of Little Easton is across the street from the Methodist church and next door to the bar. Which only partly accounts for Ben Craver’s perpetual air of besieged half tolerance.

  He regularly petitions the town council for the Lutheran church’s restoration. The solidly Methodist council has always refused. Over the years, this ritual has drawn down his jowls and carved out his belly. It is of apparently small comfort that the Lutheran congregation in neighboring Hudson uniformly regards him as one of the Elect.

  His company, never enlivening, has become a downright penance these last few months. He does not like Pea.

  She stops for a cigarette in front of the porch. Not inside the store but technically on his property, a detail she knows perfectly well. I lean against the railing and wait for the battle to engage.

  “Well, if it isn’t little Davey.” Craver pauses on the top step and wipes his hands on his apron.

  Pea gives him a look from behind her wreath of smoke: a delicately raised eyebrow, a hard half smile. With her wide-brim hat and tailored sailor dress she looks just like what everyone in town says. A colored siren come to steal their men and their morals.

  “Hiya, Mr. Craver,” she says. Her voice is deeper. She’s Phyllis again, Victor’s angel. I don’t always like that side of her, but I have always desired it.

  Craver sniffs and the folds of skin beneath his jaw crumple in a chilly nod. “Miss Green. You might recall…”

  He points to the sign prominently displayed above the open door: CORINTHIANS 6:19 NO CIGARETTES ALLOWED ON THE PREMISES.

  “I ain’t inside, now, am I?” Pea’s Harlem drawl gets thick as molasses around Craver or any of the locals. I know why she does it. It still makes things harder for us.

  “We’ll come inside as soon as she’s done, sir,” I say.

  Craver shakes his head. “Don’t drop that thing on the grass. I’m trusting you, Davey.”

  He heads back inside. Craver was the first person in town to befriend me and my mother. If I can’t make myself like him, I can’t help but feel grateful to him. We wouldn’t have survived those first few years without his generosity.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?”

  I turn to her. “I had a cigarette at the house.”

  “No, Craver, that name he calls you.”

  “Davey?” I shrug. “My mother encouraged it. She said it helped them accept me.”

  Phyllis stubs out the cigarette on the railing, leaving an ash smudge that Craver will notice, and resent. I ignore it. She starts to say something, then shakes her head and slips the butt into my pocket with the letter.
I wish the cigarette were still alight, to set the damned thing on fire.

  Craver’s store is large, navigable through narrow aisles packed so tightly that they feel in constant danger of collapse. He prides himself on his inventory, and despite his rocky relations with the town, no one would consider shopping anywhere else.

  Phyllis interrogates a laconic Craver about the greenflies and I wander away. She can fight her own battles, that I always knew. I’m even beginning to hope that she can stop them.

  As a child, these towering, mismatched shelves contained treasures that I tracked with the verve of a Robert Louis Stevenson hero. A clumsy one, it turned out. After I destroyed a purported Ming dynasty vase with a dowel, I found myself working as his assistant for a year. He refused to let my mother pay for it.

  The tracery of these memories is never far when I visit Craver’s, but today they feel tender and sore. I am haunted by my past self. There he is, squatting in the shadow of the cotton bolts. He’s telling stories about how the good king has descended to the naraka and the brave Prince Devajyoti will make a bargain with Yama, the lord of that place, to get him out.

  It takes me too long to recognize the thickness of that remembrance, the turpentine-and-sawdust scent of it. These feelings aren’t entirely mine. A boy watches me from the same shadows that I used to fold around me. He is older than I was—fifteen or sixteen—and taller, but I recognize the guarded hostility.

  “Hello,” I say, gently.

  “You’re that fella who owns the rose house by the river, aren’t you? You’re Davey.”

  “Dev,” I say, and think of Pea. “You must be the Spalding kid. Al, is it?”

  “Alvin.”

  It’s no shock that we know one another, though we’ve never met. Alvin’s the only son of Little Easton’s remaining Negro family. And my murky racial status has been fodder for the town gossip mill since we first moved to town.

  “Pleased to meet you, Alvin.” I extend my hand.

  He just stares at it. “They say you’re like me.”

  “I’m part Indian, actually.”

  “Your hands. They say you got the trick.”