Eden

by Olympia Vernon

  He sneezed. The snot sprayed the palm of his hand as he adjusted the wheel with his knees. “Get that rag out o’ the glove compartment,” he said. “Wipe this shit off my face.”

  The handkerchief was covered with motor oil. The last time I’d held it in my hands, he was teaching me how to tell a monkey wrench from the pliers and other tools. He wanted me to know the difference in case his other arm went bad. I leaned over and wiped his nose.

  “May be,” he said, “but I ain’t wurr’d. She got the head of a bull.”

  There was something between them. “I know.”

  He was a man who didn’t own his own house. Everything we had once belonged to Grandma. It bothered him: a man sleeping in the same house with the spirit of a woman who mutilated a part of him. I saw it in his nerves, the way he wouldn’t look me straight in the eye because nothing belonged to him. Everything from the bed he slept in to the plate he ate out of.

  The sun shone through the windshield; the rays came down in spheres. We were approaching the house of Mr. Diamond, the postman. His lips were yet pursed. Big Mama’s nipple had once been in his mouth. One winter day, his mother went to breastfeed him and discovered that her milk was frozen. She carried his pale body in her arms, crying. Big Mama stuck her hand beneath her own warm breast and opened his tiny mouth. She fed him so much that he became used to the brown breast, not the white one. Much later, after the milk of his mother’s nipple had thawed out, he cried himself into a frenzy when she went to feed him. She put him back in Big Mama’s arms, until the large Negro breast swallowed him. For this act of saving his life, he was grateful. But this was in no way to neglect the fact that the milk in her breasts was spawn from the penis of a white man. She was feeding Mr. Diamond the milk of a rapist. Everyone in town trusted him. Because he was the only white man who touched them. But I had my moments with him. There were times when I had stopped by the post office to check the mail, and he gave me a look that stirred the blood in my heart.

  “She ever talk about me?” asked Daddy. He moistened the tip of a cigar with his mouth, his knees guiding the truck.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  He eased off the gas. The engine hummed as he pulled into a wooded area close to where Mama and I had seen the cow in the road. “If she does,” he said, “tell me.”

  The cows ran parallel to the fence. He put the truck in reverse and paused to light his cigar, striking a redheaded match on his jeans. I knew that he wanted to ask more questions, but it wasn’t time. He was waiting to see if the machines were going to break up the solid mass of milk in her breasts.

  “Is that a beagle?” he asked.

  Whenever he saw a hunting dog in the road, he stopped to see if it had tags. If nobody owned it, he took it to the coon-on-thelog. During the springtime, he and some other men in town went out to a pond in Mount Herman, Louisiana, a small town on the Mississippi state line, to put their dogs up. It was a money game: ten to twelve wooden logs were rolled off the side of an embankment. Each man held the leash of his dog while folks bet money on the one they thought would be the first to kill the raccoon. On a good day, Daddy made good money. But Mama and I never saw it. He spent it right back up at the pool hall or trying to turn it over until it was gone. Sometimes he made up for it by selling the winning dog to another buyer. He never used the same dog twice. It was bad luck.

  “Its leg is broken,” I said.

  He pulled over to the side of the road. “Get my rifle,” he said.

  He got out of the truck and walked over to the dog. It was white with a brown patch on its stomach. He turned it over to get a better look at the bad hind leg. The dog was female. Her nipples were thick; she was pregnant.

  “Goddammit, Maddy,” he yelled. “Did you hear me? Bring me the rifle!”

  I took the gun down from the rack and passed it to him. “Here,” I said, positioning the .22 on his shoulder blade. He knew how to use a rifle. He looked down the road both ways to see if any cars were coming, focusing on the nose of the gun.

  “Get back in the truck, Maddy,” he said. “Go on now. A mutt with a broke leg ain’t good for nobody.”

  The earth called for the beagle. She knew that Daddy planned on killing her. She was quiet until her voice emerged into a fine, high shrill.

  “Come on, now, gal,” said Daddy, trying to coax her to her death. He walked over to the edge of the wood. “Be still.”

  The beagle turned over and used her three good legs to push off the fourth. She whined louder, gazing into the woods with her voice heavy in my ears.

  The rifle rested on Daddy’s shoulder. Then the beagle turned to me, as if there was something I could do to stop Daddy from killing her. Me? A child whose weekends were confined to watching over a sickness? Her tongue hung loosely from her dry mouth. Daddy aimed the .22 at her, his index finger on the trigger.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  At that moment, Jesus Sanders was on his way up the road in a gold Cadillac that he called “sunshine.” The seats were leopardprinted, and he always kept the outside greased. His hair was treated. One of the big girls at the pool hall permed it for him; I had gone to Factory with Mama once to pay off Daddy’s gambling bill, and Jesus was inside cursing out the woman, telling her how much of a bitch she was for burning up his scalp the way she did.

  He took his time coming up the road. Jesus didn’t get it in a hurry for nobody. He was a feared man. His Cadillac was his pride. Nobody fucked with his car. Nobody touched his gold. It wasn’t his fault that men feared him. They were their own fools. All he had to do was drive around and smell sweet.

  Daddy turned away from the dog. He opened the truck and put the rifle back behind the seat. “Jesus,” said Daddy as Jesus blew his horn for the dog to move out of the way. She slowly crawled back into the woods. “Hey, baby.”

  “You just the niggah I wanna see,” said Jesus. He loved to show off the gold tooth in the front of his mouth. He touched his clothes and raised his upper lip high on one side. His nose was flat and broad like the winding bone of a pork chop. Everyone feared him. Word had it that he’d killed a man in prison. They say that a number tried to cut his throat and missed his jugular by half an inch. The next morning the warden found the number hanging from his own belt.

  “I got it covered, Jesus,” said Daddy. “Ain’t no need for bad blood now, baby.”

  Daddy kept his chest high around the house, but he was a pussy when it came to Jesus. He couldn’t tell Jesus shit. He was a coward who needed a woman, a godly woman like Mama, so he could fuck her whenever he wanted.

  “Motherfucker, if I don’t see my money by nine o’clock tonight,” Jesus said, “that’s your ass.”

  He spoke through a narrow gap in the window, with his mouth up high to Daddy’s ear. He had a good motor, a Cadillac motor.

  “All right, baby,” Daddy said to him. “Sure thing, baby. You know I’m good for it.” He was fidgety. “Nine o’clock.”

  Jesus stared at me, as if he would have fucked me had I been just a little bit older. I slumped down in the front seat as he pulled off with a trail of dust behind him.

  The nerves in Daddy’s throat shook. He feared Jesus. Word had it that Jesus had been locked up in the penitentiary with my uncle Sugar for killing a man. Daddy wasn’t a man killer. He took his anger out on what gave him power. But he respected men who killed other men. They frightened him.

  “Jesus,” he said, walking back toward the truck with his hand at his side. I carried his blood in my feet. It was the part of his life that he had given me: the outward pattern of the arch, the round heel that touched down prematurely.

  He opened the driver’s-side door. “Maddy,” he said, “I’m taking you back to the house. Tell your mama that Pillar didn’t have no eggs and the cornbread ran out some kind o’ awful.”

  He drove like wildfire through the woods, praying about Jesus and his money. The cross on the rearview mirror was thick, clean. The last time I saw him use it was when his arm ached him.
He woke up in cold sweats, saying that he felt his missing arm being lifted in midair. It bothered him for some time. The more he dreamed, the more he drank. The less he prayed.

  “Sweet, Jesus,” he said.

  I cared more that I didn’t have to go inside Pillar’s and beg a white man for credit than I did about the debts he owed Jesus. It bothered me that Mama worked so hard for the white folks. Her bones so tired that she couldn’t bend down to take the shoes off her feet. Blisters pussing up her toes so tough that when she grazed them with a safety pin, the infection ran clean down the side of her foot.

  “I got you, baby,” said Daddy.

  A flock of birds sailed through the clouds, over us; the shadows of their wings over the hood of the truck. “Nine o’clock, Jesus,” said Daddy, as he looked in the rearview mirror and talked to himself repeatedly.

  The spiders were crawling into his scalp now, the poison rushing in. He needed some whiskey to keep him from thinking about the debt. Although Mama paid them, he wanted to do something on his own. His widow’s peak invaded his forehead, as if the spider was beginning to make its web. “I gotcha, Jesus,” said Daddy.

  We passed Mr. Diamond’s house. He stood with his hand pointing to one thing or another, his face the color of a dream.

  Daddy spoke: “When you get inside, tell your mama that I had to do a man’s business. You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Be sure you do,” he said. “Don’t leave nothing out.”

  Mr. Clyde came toward us on a John Deere, pulling a load of cattle behind him. He sat high on his tractor as he came down off the hill. The wheels were huge, and the motor shook him; he occasionally turned back to check to see if the cattle gate was still attached. His jaws stuck out about an inch from his molars. Every time he turned around, he spat and wiped a code of tobacco on his sleeve. He grew closer, with the wind from the hill behind him.

  “I’ll be damned,” said Daddy. “If it ain’t Clyde Pillar yonder.”

  Mr. Clyde passed by, gazing into the truck at Daddy before spitting a hurl of tobacco on the windshield. It slid down the concave glass, coating a swirling heap of old fingerprints; they were mine. I read Mr. Clyde’s lips: “Niggrah,” he said. There were more words. Other words that were foreign in my house.

  “Keep to the story,” said Daddy, looking at Mr. Clyde in his side mirror. I turned to look at the load of cattle he was pulling behind him. Mammals put into the care of a man so angry. “If you feast your eyes on that hate one more time …” said Daddy.

  I kept quiet.

  The beagle was somewhere crawling back into the woods, the babies in her stomach churning underneath the weight of her fear.

  “Hold on,” said Daddy.

  Daddy’s woolly hair came down over the back of his ears. There was one time when he shaved it all off; he didn’t want the spiders from the scrap yard crawling around in there and hatching eggs in his head.

  “Jesus,” he repeated, before pushing down harder on the gas pedal.

  Mama was standing in Mr. Rye’s front yard by the time we made it home. She went over there almost every day to see if he wanted something hot to go on his stomach. Even though he turned her down each time, she went anyway. She knew that he was old and set in his ways and that old folks didn’t trust nobody’s cooking unless they saw everything that went into the pot.

  “Be sure and tell your mama what I said,” Daddy yelled. “I gotta do a man’s business.”

  I stepped away from the truck with the .22 in my hands. Mama was across the road standing in Mr. Rye’s front yard, her hands propped up on her stomach. She knew that something was wrong, how Daddy moved when he owed a man his money.

  “Chevrolet!” said Mama, yelling behind him. “Where you going?”

  He was long gone. She took her hands off her stomach and started for the house. When her feet touched the road, she stood there a moment, the dust curling up through the trees. She paused before walking in the yard to grab the rifle out of my hands. She placed her cheek next to the barrel to see if it had been fired. “Don’t just stand there, child,” she said. “Where’d your sorry-ass pappy run off to this time?”

  “He said to tell you that Mr. Clyde ran out of eggs n’ cornmeal,” I said.

  She put one hand on her hip and sighed: “It’s Jesus, ain’t it?” she asked.

  I didn’t need to answer her.

  “Lawd, have mercy,” she said.

  She looked down at the gun now, as if she had thought of something unkind. And shook her head; the words were getting stuck in there.

  “Yeah,” she said, “it’s Jesus. I know it’s Jesus.”

  She pointed the barrel of the rifle toward the ground and walked inside the house, shaking her head. Not more than a minute later, she came back out, tucking her wild hair underneath her Goodwill hat. She always wore hand-me-downs. All because Jesus came first in our house.

  She opened her mouth and pushed a wind of breath from her lungs.

  The rustling leaves of the pine trees above my head were falling in the wind, covering the ground sporadically. Mama was now praying over the steering wheel. Driving to Mr. Sandifer’s, the pool hall, paying Daddy’s debts with Jesus and others was making her shoulders decline, leaving her at an angle that forced a bad posture on her.

  She rolled down the window. “Keep an eye on the butter beans for me,” she said. “I got some business to tend to.”

  She cranked the car and revved up the engine with her heavy foot. After putting the car in gear, she flew off down the road. I walked toward the house, listening to the muffler hum past the river before making a last turn in the direction of the pool hall.

  Even though Daddy never asked her for money, she knew that he’d never steal from her. She liked that in him—he never really asked her to pay Jesus. She did it because she loved him and wanted to have a man in the house, even if he did break all the rules.

  chapter

  five

  It was the last day of school. Miss Diamond, the postmaster’s wife, held the door open for the kids to catch their buses. I stayed behind for the third day of my detention. We had been studying Hitler. And when the test was given to me, I tore it apart. I didn’t have to learn anything about Hitler; I knew about how he’d killed Jews, the babies and mamas and papas and grandmas and grandpas and sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and cousins and future presidents and so on and so forth. His picture was the only one that I cut out of my encyclopedia. I burned it with one of my daddy’s naked-lady lighters.

  The other teachers were leaving. If our motto for the whole school year hadn’t had anything to do with Jesus, Miss Diamond’s clean, pale fingers would’ve come flying across my face. She was a small woman, her hair dyed the color of a natural disaster.

  She had ordered me to sit in silence. I sat there watching the kids push Willie in his back. Nobody knew how old he was. We just knew that after the doctors took that glass out of his head, his grandfather went up to Jackson and got him, bringing him home in a blue blanket.

  “Retard!” yelled the Mr. Goodbar bully, a kid whose heart I felt once to see if it was made out of a machine.

  The other kids yelled at Willie from the yellow buses, throwing wads of notebook paper at him as he faded behind the crew of frantic bus drivers. There was blood on his spine; it had begun to form a dotted line up to his shoulder blade.

  Miss Diamond sat at her desk and pushed her hair up from the back, looking out over the playground. “I watch you through the windows,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Her face was mechanical, the chin in the shape of an ice hook, the lips straight, almost inanimate. The lungs whispering quietly when the mouth was open. Not only her face but her bones. Her bones were mechanical.

  Willie appeared from behind the buses, riding past the window again, and later returning to get a peek at Miss Diamond through the windows. She hated Willie. He worked for her husband every night at the post office for a bag of potat
o chips and a soda. She had been around him enough indeed. But she hated his condition. She looked at him this way, as if she wanted to crack his head open, where the scar was, and find his normality.

  She ran up to the window screaming: “Get away from there!”

  Willie saw her and smiled, looking down at his hands where the rocks had scraped them, causing them to swell. He jumped on his bicycle and moved back only a little. Miss Diamond turned away from him, her hand over her mouth.

  I was tired of being silent: “I gotta go.”

  The worst she could do was tell Mr. Diamond to tell Mama the next time she stopped by the post office. I picked up my book sack and went for the door.

  “Stop waiting for the world to apologize to you,” she said, grabbing my arm.

  I ran away from her. I kept running until I got to the end of the hall, pushing the wide doors open and running past Willie and the yellow buses, never looking back at the cinder-block building.

  I relieved myself of my bag for a minute, sitting on the side of the road as the yellow bus appeared in the distance behind me. It was bus number forty-three. For some reason, Miss Birch, the driver, drove the long way to get to everybody’s house. If you lived by the bridge, she passed the bridge at least three times before she dropped you off. If you lived next to the post office, she passed it twice and dropped you off on the way back. Like my father, she was an alcoholic.

  I looked back to find Willie Patterson behind me, sitting on his bicycle seat that was so high up that he had to lean down on the handlebars to balance himself. The kids yelled, “Willie the retard!” from the yellow bus, still throwing those wads of notebook paper from the windows. He picked up speed for a moment, then gradually put one foot in the bicycle spokes to slow himself down.

  When he had been asleep in his mama’s blouse, the nipple in his mouth, he caught the wind of the world. The world killed him when the glass went through his head. Both of his parents were dead. The doctors in Jackson flushed the glass out with a hosepipe and closed up his head. I wondered how they did that, if one of the nurses held his head open and the doctor took out a sewing needle and stitched up his brains. What happened to his thoughts when his head was open? Where’d they go? The world had killed his physical self. But his spirit survived when the angels came down from the sky and wiped the dust off him; he was saved.