by C. E. Morgan
December 20: Moses Henderson, James Allen, Mr. Lewis, Scott Bishop, the brothers Da Loach, Clinton Montgomery, George Baily, Cope Mills, Samuel Bland, William Stewart, and two unidentified men.
December 21: James Stone, John Warren, Henry Davis, Henry Fitts, two pregnant women, and three unidentified men.
December 22: Joseph James, Jerry Burke, George Finley, and H. Bromley.
December 23: Sloan Allen, George King, seven men together in Georgia, James Martin, Frank West, Mack Brown, Mr. Brown, and one unidentified man.
December 24: Kinch Freeman, Eli Hilson, James Garden, five together in Virginia, and fourteen unidentified men in Meridian on this day.
Christmas Day: William Fluid, Calvin Thomas, J. H. McClinton, Montgomery Godley, King Davis, and Mr. and Mrs. Moore and more and
Filip Dunbar was one of the lucky ones, or so they say. Surely he walked out of Paris of his own free will that freezing Christmas Eve night without a word to his wife, without even his jacket or shoes. And the only things left hanging in Kentucky that Christmas were the ornaments on the trees, or so they say.
* * *
If Maryleen heard nothing, it was likely because her father had come down with the flu over Christmas and not attended church, so of course her mother had not gone but stayed home to tend to her husband, and Maryleen had not gone because she hadn’t seen the inside of a church since she was thirteen, when she’d announced she wouldn’t worship a God as cruel as this one. (“Maryleen, you fixing to go to hell!” “I’m sure the food’s better there.”) As far as she was concerned, all religious foolishness ended right then and there, even if—and she would be the first to acknowledge this—religion had saved the black race from certain suicide. But she wasn’t the black race and didn’t answer to it; she was Maryleen, and she wasn’t nearly as stupid as most folks, black or white.
If she heard nothing, it might have been because December was the busiest month in her calendar; it was hog-killing time, and she didn’t work at the Forge house from the twentieth of December until the second of January. Instead, she was busy cooking in her parents’ hall-and-parlor cottage on the outskirts of Claysville. Her mother told her with no small amount of resentment curdling her voice that Maryleen was the only colored girl in Bourbon County who got the holidays off, but Maryleen had insisted upon it when she was hired; take it or leave it. They accepted it, because her reputation preceded her, and her trial cooking sealed the deal. She had authentic talent, which she had learned was a powerful bargaining chip, and she used it to her advantage. Plus the white lady had seemed to actually like her a little bit, or perhaps merely sensed Maryleen’s dislike, which had worked its strange allure. Lavinia had probably never been disliked before. That sort of thing could unsettle a white woman and make her needy, the way cats only want to be petted by the hand that won’t touch them.
If she heard nothing, it was probably because hog killing was an all-consuming chore. Maryleen didn’t give a damn about the old-timey ways, and she was certainly aware she could purchase any pork product she wanted down at the A&P, but she did give a damn about her cooking and knew that no store-bought lard or fatback competed with what she could get from hogs fattened on their property by her own hand and then butchered in December when the old cutter came down from Georgetown. That man, born in another century to ex-slaves, would wait for a cold snap and the moon to increase; this kind of backwoods superstition and conjuration threatened Maryleen’s always tenuous relationship with patience, but she tolerated it with unusual forbearance, because the man could core a pig like it was no more trouble than an apple. His butchering was fast and deliberate and neat: he built the scaffolds himself from last year’s wood, then death came quick with barely any squealing, then the carcasses were scalded and hoisted up and hung with a gambrel. Even her father managed to put his Bible down for a few hours to aid in the process, and all the while Maryleen either helped with the cutting or stood in the kitchen, boiling coffee for the men. She wouldn’t touch coffee herself, considering it a drug no less harmful than any liquor and not something a human with good sense would tolerate in the body. The men sliced the hogs so their entrails spilled down like loose mottled sausages into the old copper pots, and from the scaffolding the shaved carcasses hung empty like glabrous, translucent lanterns for three days—bright pink with the winter sun lighting them just so—until they could be cut apart. During those three days, Maryleen went to Lexington to shop for ingredients, paying for it all herself as a Christmas gift to her parents, and then she spent the last week of the year undressing the pigs and cooking from dawn until dark. She separated the leaf lard, then rendered it in huge cast iron pots in what had once been a summer kitchen and which now saw no use except during hog-killing time; various cuts were carved, trimmings rendered down for common lard for when she didn’t need a fine pastry flavor; she saved some lean with the fat to be used later in sausage making. Then she laid away middling and jowl bacon seasoned with saltpeter and brown sugar in a meat box, and made her own sausages from the trimmings. Most of the pig couldn’t be used right away, but she was now set for a year of deep, bold flavor, at least in her own home. In the Forge house, everything was store-bought with flavors as shallow as an August pond, so she had to work twice as hard to create half the depth, but so be it. She doubted that kind of people could even tell the difference between a well-raised meat and supermarket cardboard. White folk were stupid like the sun was bright. Which was to say, shatteringly.
So she was tired when she walked the three miles to the Forge house at five in the morning on the second of January, 1954. She was sweating through her blouse despite the cold when she finally approached the house, which stood tomblike on its hillock alongside the slushing creek, barely visible against the cinder-colored sky. It was not yet dawn, but normally there would already be at least two lights burning in the upper house and in a barn as well, where a worker would be tending to the horses. But the house was dark. Only when Maryleen slipped into the kitchen did a single bulb illuminate a room on the second floor, but that she didn’t see.
The kitchen was so quiet, hollow-feeling, and undisturbed that she did something unusual: she lit a fat, drippy beeswax candle instead of switching on the bulb over the stove. It preserved a bit of the early-morning peace, while she laid out buttermilk and butter to warm for biscuits, and rooted around for peach jam in the outdated icebox. She reached behind her for the egg bowl, which Filip placed on the butcher-block island every morning prior to her six o’clock arrival—but no egg bowl. She swiveled around, staring at the deeply scarred block, exactly at the spot where the bowl should have been, and thought, why that lazy old drunk—
The boy was in the room. He stood there in his boxer shorts and a rumpled white undershirt, which was risen up and showed some of his pale stomach. The sight of his flesh made Maryleen rear back in distaste and alarm. Not only was he dressed improperly, but he appeared ravished and worn, as though he’d suffered some wasting disease over the holidays that left his hair sweaty and deep hollows like blackened lime slices beneath his eyes. Even in the mild, shifting candlelight, he looked like a buzzard off a gut pile.
“What’s wrong with you? You ill?” Even her concern sounded like an insult.
Henry didn’t move further into the room. He just shook his head, exhaustion lining his face.
“If you’ve got a fever, I don’t want you near me. Make your mama tend you.”
“Mother isn’t here. Father sent her away to Florida.”
Maryleen raised a hand. “That’s not my business. Go on back to bed. I need to fetch eggs. Filip didn’t fetch them for me this morning.” She scooped up a yellow ware bowl, actually glad now that the chore hadn’t been done, as it gave her a chance to escape this strange troll of a boy, but he said, “Filip isn’t here anymore.”
It wasn’t just the words, but the way he said them—so deliberately, like something memorized and carefully recited to an audience of one. It made Maryleen stop with her han
d on the brass knob of the door with just enough time to note the cool oval shape, how similar it was to an egg only nowhere near as fragile, before her mind reared up. That thing that had been waiting like a stalking cat ready to spring had sprung.
“Oh,” she said, her voice oddly cool, disembodied from her beating chest. “Where’s he working now?”
His voice wavered, hesitant. “I don’t believe he’s working anywhere anymore, Maryleen.”
The way he said her name filled her with dread. She stepped out the door without another word, clutching the bowl to her belly and walking a few paces, then half running through the dark toward the chicken coops behind the horse barn. Her breath was coming in shallow draws and her face was flushed. She kneeled on shaky legs and reached around blindly in the coop, pushing hens aside impatiently, so they winged about and complained, and she dropped two eggs in her haste, one chicken escaping the hutch, so it required a minute to wrestle it back in. Six eggs in the bowl now, and she was walking back to the house, because she didn’t know what else to do. In lieu of proper thought, her legs just ferried her back, the minions of habit. The morning was still dark as the inside of a stove, the sun a long way off.
Thank God the boy was no longer in the kitchen when she returned. She placed the bowl on the butcher block, just as Filip would have done, and without further hesitation tiptoed as quickly as she could to the black phone, where it hung in the hallway. She couldn’t call her mother; her white folk didn’t rise until seven. Anyway, her mother would have told her if she’d known something. Her father’s preacher? No—Miss Martin, her old Home Economics teacher, the woman who had taught her everything she knew about cooking. Miss Martin would be awake; she woke every morning at four thirty for her morning prayers.
The phone was answered swiftly after two rings. There was that reliable, gracious voice with its precise elocution. “Good morning,” it said. “This is Ella Martin speaking.”
“Miss Martin!” Maryleen rasped with a hand curved around the receiver. “It’s Maryleen!”
“Yes, Maryleen. I’d recognize that voice anywhere. What are you doing calli—”
“Where’s Filip?” Maryleen interrupted. Into the tiniest hint of a pause, Maryleen whispered, “Filip Dunbar.”
“I know the Filip to whom you’re referring,” said Miss Ella. “Maryleen, he ran off over a week ago, just up and went. Left Susah on her own, which some might argue is for the best. They’d been having a lot of trouble recently from what I hear. My goodness, child, surely you didn’t call me at this hour to gossip with an old woman.”
“Oh God.”
“Maryleen.” The voice was curving into a question when Maryleen abruptly hung up the phone and stood there in the dark, her mind sorting and measuring, but knowing she was way too late to the equation. The final numbers had already been calculated by others.
“Who were you talking to, Maryleen?”
Despite the alarm that sent her body rimrod straight, despite the fact that she would whip around and see him standing there like a ghost in the shadows of the hall, her first acid thought was “with whom.”
“My mama,” she lied, her answer formulated before she even turned. There was a frightening stillness in Henry’s form, and his face was set in shadows, so she couldn’t know exactly what it held. She was sweating now, and her charged breath was audible.
“Today’s my shopping day,” she said uselessly into the silence, but he didn’t respond.
Then she snapped, her voice keening upward from a barely suppressed panic, “Go ask your father how I’m supposed to get to the grocery without a driver!”
“He’s not awake.”
“Go!” she cried.
For a second, he looked as though he was about to go do just that, but he didn’t. He said, “You can’t tell me what to do.”
Her mind reeled. The last time she’d been in the house, only ten days prior, she could have told him to drink lye and somehow, by virtue of her bandsaw personality or her seniority or just her evil eye, she could have gotten him to do it. But whatever power she had held in her hand at the end of December, he was holding in his hands now in this hallway, in this new year. Wearing a thin mask of frustration over rising fear, she shouldered roughly past him, stalked down the hall to the kitchen, trying her best to appear angered by his eavesdropping.
But he followed her. He stood watching as she banged copper and tin pots around mindlessly. She wasn’t a cryer, but the first droplets of grief and fear were wringing from the winepress of her mind.
“I can’t cook with you staring at me like that,” she finally hissed over her shoulder.
“Maryleen,” he said. “Do you think we all eventually get the punishment we deserve?”
“What?” she snapped.
“I mean, if God doesn’t exist, then he can’t punish anyone. I guess we have to do it ourselves,” he said. “See, man actually is the measure of all things. Man wrote all the books, so he’s the measure even if he says he isn’t. We invented God to tell us to do what we already wanted to do. That’s what I think.”
“Punishment? You mean men? What?” She had no idea what he was talking about, what he was trying to riddle out to her, but her body made its own interpretation, a trace of cold wending its way down from between her shoulder blades to her tailbone, and the sudden feeling that she had to pee.
“I heard you say Filip did something,” he said quietly, and the sound of his voice was the thing that frightened her most of all, the queer way he sounded like a little boy when he said it. When she turned, his eyes were enormous and febrile, and she couldn’t stop the words as they rose up from her very belly, passing through the esophagus constricted by fear and then through the ashes in her mouth: “What have you done?”
He reared back, a look of injury on his face. When he spoke, she could see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “Nothing. I was trying to do the right thing. All I want is to grow up.”
“I said”—she hissed—“what have you done.”
“I didn’t do anything! I just told Father what you said.”
Maryleen’s brow crumpled up in bewilderment. “What I said?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
She stared at him without a word, waiting.
“You said Filip touched Mother. I heard you.”
She gasped. “Oh my God.”
“Maryleen—”
Her finger was trembling when it punctuated the air between them. “You are evil.”
Sudden rage blasted through him like fire. “No, I’m not! He touched Mother!”
Maryleen’s eyes grew impossibly wide. “He touched your whore mother,” she said, and then leaned so far over the butcher block, she was practically lying on it to yell into his face, “BECAUSE SHE WANTED IT!”
Henry reached out and swept the bowl with its eggs onto the floor, fury undoing what was left of his reserve. “Get out of my house, Maryleen!” he screamed. “Get out now!”
Only later would she look back furiously and think of herself as some slave ordered about by a little boy who had just discovered he would be master someday, talking big at the kitchen girl, who obeyed him, not even stopping to snuff out the candle, just grabbing her jacket and a black goatskin purse she’d spent a week’s wages on. The door spun a draft that gutted the candle and left Henry in the darkness behind her.
Maryleen raced down the drive in a flat-out panic and onto the road toward Paris; it was only six fifteen; there was no one about and still no play of light on the eastern horizon. A sense of unreality enveloped her now as she hastened along; had those words really passed between them, had she just imagined the absence of Filip? But no, there’d been no egg bowl waiting, this was real and actually happening. Yet, surely she was overreacting; she tried to calm her mind, she didn’t really think anyone was coming after her, not really, there was no lynch mob waiting for the girl cook, though she glanced fearfully over her shoulder for headlights; yes, the boy was just messing with
her, she was turning this into something it wasn’t, she just needed to calm down. But by the time she was approaching the outskirts of town, sweating through her blouse, she could almost see Filip hanging from a tree right before her eyes, and her decision was made. Later, she would realize there had been a sneaky joy smuggled into her fear, that she hadn’t been quite as afraid as she remembered, that she had forced her own panic like a hothouse flower to compel her stubborn spirit to the action for which it had always—always—been intended. What had she been thinking, turning down colleges and ending up in a white kitchen like that? What exactly had she been trying to prove? Or avoid?
Her own house was empty, her mother and father both at work. In the wallpapered room where she had grown up—odd how the ugly trellised pea-blossom paper would soon be a thing she remembered fondly—she shoved two outfits and her spare pair of shoes into an old fabric traveling bag, but then eyed the single line of mysteries on her shelf and removed the extra shoes, returning them to her nearly empty closet. Nine mysteries and her pocket Shakespeare fitted snugly into the bag, all that the space would allow. Quickly, she removed her sweaty clothing and shrugged into a loose-fitting black blouse and a rayon skirt that fell below her knees, identical to the other three sets she owned and under which no hint of a figure could be discovered. With that final task complete, she was down the steps and out of the old house, site of her father’s Bible reading, of her mother’s weariness, of her own bad-tempered childhood. She didn’t leave a note, she would call them from Lexington—no, Cincinnati; first she would leave this bloody borderland behind. She intended to apologize to Miss Martin for hanging up on her, but Miss Martin would understand—she loved her like a daughter; Maryleen knew that. Then as she was shutting the old walnut front door, bag in hand, she suddenly stopped, her swarming thoughts stilled, and she stood at her fullest height, fear vanishing. She didn’t know where the certainty came from or why, but she suddenly knew she was going to New York City, that she’d find a job in a restaurant and then figure it out from there, and she felt now that she didn’t have a moment to lose, that her very life depended on it.