Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  By early April, the sun had started to warm the frozen earth, but winter still gripped them in the mornings and evenings. On Sunday, when Mrs. Grundy had her day off, she went down to the basement boiler herself to shovel in coal and heat the pipes that had frozen overnight. Lord, but Tamara’d be glad for spring. She’d never passed a winter so damn cold in her life. She’d go to Paris when the war was over. Every club was integrated over there, they said, none of this crass American business of sitting in the back or beneath the stairs when she was allowed in at all. When she came back, she’d teach Pea all the new post-war dances, show off all her post-war French. She wanted Pea to be at her wedding, she wanted to show her Lawrenceville, for their babies to grow up together, for them to grow old together. What did she care what Phyllis had done in Victor’s service? She’d never been her angel—

  Tamara’s heart seized so convincingly that she cried out and collapsed against the stairs. “Oh Jesus,” she whispered, and then, for a time, could do no more than wheeze. She waited to see if she would die, but her vision cleared and her heart kept beating and the cards, they were waiting.

  They had known she would give in. She laid them out right there on the basement stairs with trembling hands, while Phyllis slumbered in what Tamara hoped was peaceful ignorance two floors above.

  The cards sighed onto the wood. She laid them out in a pentagram with the head at the bottom and the heart marked at the center. This pattern was for listening, feeling the cards out. It had taken her years to learn to read so many numbers at once with their multiple inversions. But with Aunt Winnie’s sharp voice guiding her, Tamara had learned to take in the pattern, to let the cards hold her, to feel the lines supporting the numbers at each point and cohering in its center.

  Left foot, three of diamonds, neutral; right foot, three of hearts, upright; left hand, ten of spades, reversed; right hand, ace of spades, reversed; head, queen of hearts, upright; and heart, the suicide king himself, axe and diamond above his blue-black visage, reversed.

  The oracle stared down at the numbers with soft, glassy eyes. If anyone were around to watch her (and there was, she knew that, if you were generous with your definition of “anyone”), they would have seen her hands relax their unconscious grip on her terrycloth robe, her lips part, her eyes take on a dreamy concentration particular to opium eaters and oracles. Slowly, the pattern came clear.

  Threes were neutral numbers, half six, which was the number of death. But two times three made six, which meant life and danger. The diamonds represented untold wealth, the hearts unspeakable grief. They were upright, but in the head-down pentagram, what was upright was also reversed. Life and death, then, a cycle that had the potential for both great rewards and brutal heartbreak. And in the position at the feet, it meant that they wanted to move, but something hadn’t quite let them yet. The hands and heart made a line of reversed cards. These were Pea’s hands, full of spades that were falling to the earth. From the ace to the ten, she had been given great power and it was slowly falling away. The direction, the purpose of those blades, had been twisted. And now that corruption had reached her heart. But that suicide king didn’t have to kill himself for the corruption to be reversed. Someone could take it from him: the queen of diamonds, the monarch at the head and yet behind them all, the voice of the cards that moved through the oracle who was Tamara, the voices of the ancestors clamoring in her head, The corruption shall be burned from this earth and the way made clean! We are in the earth, we are in the trees, we are in the sky. We see! Beware us!

  The oracle shook and trembled. The cards, the luck, they roared beneath her fingers, but the oracle was gone, lost in the frozen earth, in the slow-moving sap of sleeping trees, in the feathered clouds of a dawn sky.

  Above her body, a woman called her name.

  Tamara opened her eyes as though peeling back an orange. She opened them as she had been, facing the closed door at the top of the basement stairs. It was open now, and Phyllis was in it, backlit by the yellow dawn light streaming from the French windows in the parlor. Beside her was Victor staring murder at the both of them. Phyllis’s hands were twisted behind her back but they surged sideways now, flailing toward Victor’s chest. Phyllis cursed and threw herself back against the doorframe. Tamara pushed the cards aside and scrambled up the stairs. She ran straight through Victor and she could swear the air he occupied smelled unclean, like the butcher’s shop at the height of summer. Phyllis was on her knees, one shoulder hitched against the far wall, sweat pouring down her face as she wrestled with the ends of her own arms. Tamara wanted to scream herself, at the sight of it. But she took a shaky breath and grabbed Phyllis around the waist.

  “Pea, calm down! Pea!”

  Pea relaxed against her, but the hands twisted and smacked the pocked and gouged floorboards that Mrs. Grundy had polished just last week. The hands were reaching for Victor, standing above them. In a fit of rage, Tamara dropped Phyllis and reached for the hands instead. They were too fast for her, of course. They smacked her hard the second she tried.

  “Leave her be!” Tamara screamed. “Sweet Jesus, leave her be! Can’t you see it’s too late? Can’t you see he’s already dead!”

  The hands, Pea’s beautiful, scarred hands, hit her like a steel bar on the jaw and Tammy slid quietly to the floor.

  * * *

  When she came around, Tamara was still on her back on the warped floorboards. But someone had put a blanket over her and a pillow under her head and was icing her jaw with a block wrapped in a towel.

  “Is he gone?” Tamara asked. The jaw hurt but it didn’t feel broken. Her head, however, felt wrung out and stuffed with moldy towels.

  Phyllis, squatting awkwardly beside her, bent forward and held out two fingers.

  “Can you see me? How many fingers am I holding up?”

  Tamara rolled her eyes and swatted the hand away. The earth rocked for a bit and Pea held her until it subsided. “Your hands are safe again?”

  Phyllis’s jaw clenched. “They’re mine again.”

  “So he must be gone.”

  “Victor.” Pea’s voice was flat.

  “Who else. Don’t tell me you still don’t believe me? After that little show?”

  “My hands—”

  “Decided to play jacks with my face. They don’t seem to know he’s dead. They still want you to kill him.”

  Phyllis closed her eyes. Her voice broke. “I am so goddamn sorry, Tammy.”

  Tamara swallowed thickly, past a lump in her throat as bright and salty as fresh blood. “Why didn’t you just kill him when you had the chance, Pea?”

  Phyllis just shook her head. “Here, baby, can you sit up? Let’s get you somewhere more comfortable. I tried to carry you, but … well.”

  Between them they got Tamara to the couch in the salon and then Phyllis busied herself making a fire. The steam was just barely coming up through the pipes and the room was so cold Tamara could see her breath. She was starting to get the sort of headache that would lay her out for days. Even the firelight made her squint. And yet, seeing Phyllis so frightened and apologetic hurt her more. What were they going to do? The hands didn’t care about Phyllis anymore, if they ever had. The corruption shall be burned from this earth and the way made clean! Tammy didn’t want the way made clean, not if it had to be like this.

  She started to shake again and pulled the covers up higher. “Could you bring me some tea?”

  That took Phyllis into the kitchen and gave Tamara time to compose herself. She was the oracle and Phyllis was her best friend. She would use the cards and find some way out. She would understand the hands and make them yield.

  Phyllis came back and handed her a mug. “Cardamom tea. I forgot that we still had a little in the pantry.”

  Dev used to make it for her too. Tamara breathed it in, recalling that bittersweet love, full of romantic gestures and empty of commitment. Her hands tightened around the mug, but she didn’t look up.

  “The cards say your hands
turned against you. That you did what you shouldn’t have and didn’t do what you should have, and now they’ve gone bad.”

  “You get all that from a bunch of numbers?”

  “Numbers and suits. It’s my calling.”

  “It is that. Did they say there was something I could do about it?”

  “No,” Tamara said, which wasn’t a lie, though it felt like one. If she were going to let Phyllis die like this, shouldn’t she at least tell her? But Tamara couldn’t bear the look in Phyllis’s eyes any more than she could bear the sacrifice the cards demanded to save her. She cleared her throat.

  “I mean, I didn’t ask. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the hands, and how they work with the numbers. It sometimes feels as though the numbers and the hands are all part of the same ball of chance. The universe connects them, and we just get glimpses of where it’s going.”

  Pea laughed. “The universe plays policy now?”

  “Why not?” Tamara warmed to her theme; it felt like a way out. “It’s just luck. Just a little bit of luck that gets you ahead. You know how many of us get our start in business from a lucky hit? Every policy slip is a little pebble thrown against the system. It’s our people saying, we know they got it all now, but we’ll get ours, too, someday. Why can’t the hands be like that? But now it’s not a pebble, it’s a big rock. It might actually make a dent in that wall if you all throw at the same time.”

  “But we don’t.”

  “But you could.”

  “Oh, now you’re talking black liberation?”

  “Dev isn’t black. I’m talking global liberation.”

  “Gracious, girl, you making me tired just listening to you.”

  “Has that baby dreamed you anything lately?”

  “Bodies. Men and women. A river of rotting meat.”

  8

  In April the women went outside more, now that the ground had thawed and the sun came out for more than shy minutes at a time. In her eighth month, Phyllis moved slowly but with ponderous grace. The horrors of the first two trimesters appeared to have lessened, but in the absence of physical pain she grew quieter and more reflective. She looked at Tamara sometimes with a panicked despair that neither of them could answer. The baby kept dreaming, but whatever those dreams left behind she didn’t share.

  Tamara called her grandma. Just the sound of that voice made her nostalgic and aching for home—a home she couldn’t wait to get out of when she was actually there. She and her cousins had gotten together to pay for a phone line the year before, after Grandma had sworn she’d die in that old house, no use trying to convince her to move in with Tamara’s mother. They chatted for a while—the latest church gossip, the exodus of St. Paul’s students signing up for the war, the new chapter of the NAACP that a young dentist and his professor wife were talking about opening in town.

  “Now, I know you did not call me to talk about all that small-town business you couldn’t stand when you were living here,” she said. “So, out with it, girl.”

  Tamara smiled and imagined the fondness of her grandma’s frown as she said this, eyebrows raised, lips pursed. “When you were growing up, did you know people with saint’s hands?”

  She sucked her teeth. “You want to know about that? Don’t know what good it ever did them, but sure, there were about a dozen in town when I was a child. We used to whisper about getting dreams. For a while even I wanted one, but thank the Lord he spared me that burden.”

  “Is it so bad to have the hands, Grandma? Who wouldn’t want a little extra?”

  “I sure don’t! Of those dozen I knew back in the day, only one lived to see forty. And he’s still with us, but Syl Freeman lives alone in that hunting shack and he don’t go out much. I think he just decided to keep his head down and survive. In any case, he’s the last of his kind. No one has had a dream in town for I don’t know how long. Your mother would claim it’s the power of the Lord over the devil’s works.”

  She said this with such disdain—and a faint impression of her mother’s cadences—that Tamara had to laugh. “You aren’t buying that, huh?”

  “Hell, no! Pardon my language, but your mother is just hot and bothered by that nice-looking pastor of hers. No, whatever the hands were, they didn’t come from the devil. They were holy. Too holy for a human to hold them for long. All them that got the dreams would … they would try, Tammy. They would go to the town hall and try to vote for mayor. They would walk straight up to the lunch counter at Central Diner and sit there while the white folks worked themselves into a lather. More than a couple got themselves lynched that way. If they left town, it was more of the same. They became criminals, they hid in the woods, they joined armies, but they could not abide. They couldn’t wait for their reward in heaven, they had to bring it right on down here. And they couldn’t.”

  Tammy took a breath, slow and steady. “I hear you.”

  “Those old souls,” Grandma said softly, “they suffered too much.”

  “They—who suffered?” But she knew. She’d felt them most of her life.

  “Do you remember,” Grandma said, “that old story about your nana? Been thinking about it lately. Funny that you called about the hands, because I’ve been catching myself reminiscing. An NAACP chapter here in Lawrenceville of all places. It makes me wonder what we could do with a pair of hands…”

  “About Nana? You mean, the night they told her she was free?”

  She could imagine her grandmother’s slow nod, her distant eyes.

  “I never told you all of it. Your nana didn’t like to talk about it. It was March. Winnie and I were young, no more than six. They’d taken Charleston and Sherman was marching north and everyone knew it was over. And then there was a rumor that it had happened, Lincoln had come to Richmond and we were all free. Winnie and I ran out with the other children, whooping and hollering. We were young, but we knew what freedom meant, all right. At some point the old store house caught fire. Maybe someone set it, maybe a lamp broke, but it was burning bright. We ran for water. Everyone was busy trying to put it out. But your nana turned around, and saw them all lined up right on the edge of the forest. All the old slaves. The ones that had tried to run and got themselves turned to dog food. The ones that had collapsed in the fields. The ones that’d had the luck to die free, or close to it. Hundreds, thousands—depending on her mood, because you remember how your nana enjoyed elaborating. But there they were, watching the fire and the new freemen, laughing. The dead didn’t speak. They were silent as a knot on a log. But their eyes, Annie, she’d tell me, their eyes were brighter than the flames. They flashed so bright she could hardly see. And when they flashed, she felt the wind. It was hot and dry, as if it had blown in from the Sahara, but your nana had been born in New Orleans, so she recognized the salt in it, that green hint of the ocean. It knocked her to her knees. And then that wind, it circled around her, as if it were a dog sniffing. And for a moment, she saw. She saw that wind as a great blue fire, coursing through the sky, boiling around her.

  “And before it passed over them entirely, little fingers of it touched the heads of three people from the plantation, and they fell into a dead swoon. And wouldn’t you know, just after the war the rumors started about the dreams, about the hands, about people with a knack for the numbers. And for a few years during Reconstruction it seemed that it might be working. We opened banks, we bought land, we got ourselves elected.

  “There used to be more people with the hands, child, many, many more. Then white folks—well, they couldn’t abide any power they could not have. They didn’t believe in the hands, but they killed them anyway. And your nana couldn’t do anything about it, with just her cards and her numbers. You inherited that, you and Winnie. You don’t have the hands, but you can see.”

  Tamara chewed on that conversation with her grandmother while life in the house moved as slowly and sweetly as it ever did. Mrs. Grundy baked cakes and pandowdies and soft banana puddings. Phyllis read the books her sister sent her: religio
us tracts and the latest bestsellers interspersed with a few offerings from Harlem’s literary old guard: The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes and an anthology of short stories, The New Negro.

  Two weeks passed and she didn’t take out the cards once.

  She was thinking about what it meant to be an oracle, to see but to be unable to act. She hadn’t understood that burden when Aunt Winnie taught her the numbers. She hadn’t known that what they did was connected to how people like Phyllis turned their little bit of luck between clever fingers. But while those hands might be theirs, they didn’t entirely belong to them. They were possessed, just as Walter had said, but not by luck—or at least, not luck as she had imagined it to be, impartial and unpredictable.

  In India, Dev once told her, people started getting the dreams after a failed rebellion against British rule called the Mutiny. In Haiti, it had happened right before their revolution. Maybe the American Indians got them earlier than anyone on this continent, in those days when the pilgrims were stealing their land and slaughtering them for sport. But in the former territories of the failed Confederacy, the dreams came down the day the slaves were free.

  She could not avoid it, any more than her grandmother could. Those old souls, they suffered too much. What did they suffer? The million indignities of a human being sold and worked and raped and culled as property. And when they saw their brothers and sisters and sons and daughters at last freed, what did they do? They sent them a gift. Or something like it—a little bit of luck, a little bit of hope, a chance to lift the weight. It was almost enough. But the weight came back with horses and hoods and red fire. And in each generation, the hands touched fewer and fewer—while the spirit that animated them grew angrier and angrier.