Eden

by Olympia Vernon

  The yellow bus came to a complete stop in the road. Miss Birch put one hand in the air and begged the kids to keep the noise down. “You can ride the bus if you want,” she said.

  “I can stretch it,” I said.

  She saw Willie in her side mirrors. “Sure?”

  The Mr. Goodbar bully balled his fists up at me. I would never see him again. His daddy had gotten a job making caskets down in New Orleans. His face was organized—like an atlas.

  I looked back at Miss Birch: “I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I’ll see you when school starts.”

  She drove away. The Mr. Goodbar bully ran to the back of the yellow bus and pressed his face against the window, pointing his fingers at Willie, laughing with his tongue pulling out from his tonsils.

  “You coming?” I asked Willie. “Don’t just stand there!”

  He appeared shocked. “Diamond hurt Maddy?”

  He repeated this sentence several times. I emptied my sack on the road, trying to find the piece of the aluminum foil that I had saturated with Vaseline for my cracked lips. “No,” I said, blowing out a breath of fresh air, “Diamond didn’t hurt Maddy. My lips dry,” I said, finding the Vaseline and spreading it across my mouth.

  Willie gradually put his feet on the pedals, those enormous Chuck Taylors weighing heavily on the tires. He made circles around me, stopping to put his index finger up to his mouth, imitating the way a lady puts her lipstick on. “Diamond hurt Maddy?” he asked again.

  I hurriedly put my things back into my book sack, becoming aggravated. “No, Willie,” I said. “Diamond didn’t hurt Maddy.”

  “Diamond hurt Maddy,” he said, shying away from me with his head to the ground.

  He belonged to the stars now, so everything he said was serious, honest.

  “What are you talking about, Willie?”

  He pointed up toward the sky. “His eye cry too,” he said, cradling his eyes from me as if I were going to hit him. “His eye cry like a itty-bitty baby.”

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said, walking up to him. He was so afraid that he fell off the bicycle. He no longer trusted. “The other kids hurt Willie ’cause Willie different. Not ’cause Willie bad.”

  “Not kid!” he said, looking as though he wanted to cry. “Man. Man hurt lady. Man hurt Willie!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He jumped back on the bicycle. The long scar ran up the side of his head; he turned back around, screaming: “Man hurt lady!”

  I wondered if Mr. Diamond or his wife had been beating him in private. Or his grandfather. But I knew that it couldn’t have been the grandfather. He had already lost his only daughter. Willie was all that he had left. Something was missing. “Man hurt lady”; those words played time and time again inside my head, as Willie was in high speed now, his large Chuck Taylors pedaling through the dust.

  Before I made it to the bridge by the house, I saw Jesus coming toward me, driving slowly. I wanted to show him the scratches on Mama’s fingers from getting Mr. Clyde’s clothes off the barbwire after a hard wind, how hard she worked to pay him. But I kept walking, growing nervous as I heard the sound of his tires screech on the warm ground beneath me.

  He pulled up beside me.

  “I don’t bite,” he said, rolling his window down.

  “Just a piece to go.”

  The more I walked, the more he backed up the Cadillac, keeping his eyes on me and my fear, my anger. The tires rolled over the rocks and clumps of red dirt in the road. I walked faster, thinking about Willie Patterson and those words and wishing I had the speed of his bicycle. “Leave me alone!”

  I looked Jesus straight in the eye. He stopped the car as I looked to see if Mama was standing out near Mr. Rye’s house. She wasn’t.

  “Don’t forget who I am,” he said, laughing out loud in a deep, threatening voice. “I’m Jesus.”

  He spun off down the road with the powder of the earth behind him coating the air like a whore’s perfume.

  chapter

  six

  A tiny ray of light came through my bedroom window.

  It was third Sunday at Owsley Sanctified Church. I stayed home to wait for Miss Hattie Mae’s grandson, Landy Collins, to take down the hog pen in the backyard. Miss Hattie Mae was the mother of only one child, a daughter, who was pretty bent on not coming back to Pyke County. I think the place was too small for her. But she always sent Landy Collins to do carpentry work for the townsfolk: like the father of the Mr. Goodbar bully, Landy Collins was a casket maker down in New Orleans.

  He was twenty-three years old with a muscular, well-to-do body. The bones under his charcoal skin fell into a perfectly chiseled form. Every summer, I’d sit by my window, waiting for the sound of his Ford to come flying up the road.

  One time he stood outside my window and asked if he could touch me. I told him that his thing was too big. Truth was—I thought I’d end up in a pasture somewhere, butt naked like Big Mama, with blood coming from the hole between my legs, scarred.

  Mama’s body came into clear view. She struggled with a pair of stockings, trying to get them over her thighs in time for church. The more she bent over, the wider the hole in the panties. Her pubic hair darkened the coffee-colored stockings, until the vaginal pouch stuck out through the hole like the oval surface of a hard-boiled egg.

  “I’ll be tired when I get in from Owsley,” she said. “See if Hattie Mae grandboy’ll take you out to Pip’s after supper.”

  She stuck the pubic hair back inside the stockings and pulled her skirt down, the lavender flowers heavily embroidered into the yellow. She then looked in the mirror and turned to one side, rubbing her hands on her blouse until they left the mark of a diamond on her clothes. “Look at me,” she said, touching the fat of her stomach now. “I’ll be waiting on hell to close up ’fore this go down.”

  She sat down on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. “The Lawd’s been good to me, though. I can’t complain.”

  Jesus passed by with the exhaust pipes hauling a line of smoke into the cold air. She pretended not to see him. I think it embarrassed her to chase Jesus around like she did. She went broke for Jesus. Jesus controlled her.

  “He followed me,” I said.

  The glass vase was shattering now. She got up from the bed before the pieces hit the floor, her vagina leaving an odor in the air.

  “I gotta go,” she said. “You gone make me late for church.”

  The bottom was falling out of her shoes. She walked with her feet close to the ground; the others would notice, the women who worked just as hard as she did but had a decent pair of shoes to wear to church. If they had nothing else, they had a firm ivory slip, a couple of starched and ironed dresses, and a strong pair of hardbottomed shoes that lasted a few years. They paid their debts to Jesus and nothing interfered with that. Mama went to church, but she gave her life to the wrong Jesus, the mortal one.

  Shortly after she pulled out of the yard, Daddy appeared at my door. He had begun to smell like milk. He had been doing extra work for Mr. Diamond, who had bought fourteen cows from Mr. Clyde. “Where your mama?” he asked.

  “Church,” I said.

  He thrust his hips forward and rested his backbone on his buttocks, as if the work had been beaten into him subconsciously. “What time she coming home?” he asked.

  “Didn’t say.”

  He went to their bedroom, closing the door like he had been waiting for her to leave all along. He was counting money. I knew that sound like I knew my bones. He was sighing now, stuffing the money into his pockets.

  Not long ago, some men came down from Chicago. He had already owed Jesus money. He didn’t care too much about his life. Time and time again, he went back down to the pool hall. Each time they put him out, telling him that he couldn’t come till he paid Jesus. But they’d let him in sometimes, when Jesus was out of town and the cool cats were in there. The ones who didn’t talk, because they knew that he would play himself, that if Jesus c
aught him in there, he would kill Daddy. Sure. Jesus could have easily come to the house and gunned him down in the front yard. But I think it meant something to him, under all that tough skin of his, that Mama worked so hard to pay him. I believe that if he hated Daddy for anything, it was because he let his woman scrub toilets to pay his debts. She was the only one who could make Jesus wait for his money. He trusted her.

  Daddy opened the door. “If she get here ’fore I do,” he said, “tell her I went to see a man about a mule.”

  He was lying again. It was the way he turned his eyes away from me when he said this, his unpicked Afro, the alcoholic sweat on the corner of his upper lip.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He walked back up the hall, breathing hard, loose. He hadn’t yet opened the kitchen door. The wind outside whistled into a strong force against the shutters. He stopped somewhere over the kitchen window, as he often did, thinking of the day he fucked Aunt Pip, the fire-engine-red lipstick falling from her hand, settling on the ground like a bottle of aspirin.

  He returned. “Just tell her I went to see a man,” he said.

  He coughed long and hard. The sound of it echoed throughout the walls of the house. He then went outside and cranked the truck before stepping out of it to check the wires. He was in a world of his own. Head bent low, he looked the engine over and tapped an exposed cylinder. “It’s been a long time,” he yelled, raising his hand to Landy Collins, who had walked over to greet him.

  Landy had grown thicker. His shoulders high in the air with the confidence of a white man. His large hands, swollen from work. His face—a perfect mask that fit over the bones with a lasting impression. Beautiful.

  Daddy had begun to talk about his days of infidelity, the flesh of a whore’s vagina, the rawness of it. He leaned away from Landy Collins and made a circle with his hand.

  “Landy,” I whispered, stepping back from the window and looking at myself in the mirror. Maybe one day, I thought, I would let him pet my fur. It hadn’t yet grown into a full shade of wires like Mama’s. I could have never shown it to him the way it was. It would have embarrassed us both.

  He and Daddy were under the hood of the truck, both tapping something electrical. “That should do it,” said Landy.

  At the sound of his voice, I touched myself inside. The way I thought he would have touched me had I given him a chance. His voice grew deeper, louder.

  “Maddy,” yelled Daddy from the cylinders, “Landy’s here.”

  I came and my legs gave out, as I shook recklessly in my clothes, my fingers slippery. In my desire, I heard Landy Collins say the word: “Pussy,” he said.

  “Be out in a minute,” I said, resting my body on the mattress in an effort to regain my strength.

  Later that day, Landy Collins made it to the backyard. He stood next to the hog pen, measuring everything with care. The orange sun in his eyes, picking up the hammer when necessary. His muscles were circular. He turned his face upward, exposing the jawbone.

  My flesh was soaked with sweat as the pot on the stove boiled over, steaming up the house in a thick fog. I went to the refrigerator and stood there for a while, watching a cube of ice melt on my skin. I took out a lemon and cutting board, sitting them down on the kitchen table. The table wobbled badly. Daddy had been drunk when he built it; it was the only thing he could afford to give Mama as a wedding gift.

  I cut myself.

  The blood came down in ripples over the blade.

  “Maddy,” said Landy as he made his way through the back door.

  He walked toward me, the heat from his body rising into a translucent cloud in the air. He was dark like a nightmare in the middle of the night that no one could pull herself out of.

  The blood from the blade had dripped on the floor, the trail making a dotted pattern, the corpse of a dragon. Or a dinosaur.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, hiding my finger behind my back, the blood cold.

  “Let me see.”

  He cornered me against the wall, the sweat from his balls rising in the fog. And suddenly, as if without thinking, he took my finger in his mouth and sucked the blood from it.

  The kitchen was silent now.

  He walked back out to where the hog pen was coming down, my blood in his mouth.

  It was dark outside now, active. The dirt was dry, and the government men had bush-hogged the weeds onto the side of the road. The earth wasn’t orange anymore. The insects were out parading on it. Their voices spoke to one another with a language heard, absent a vowel, a consonant, a constant dialect. Yet I heard them fucking around in the darkness.

  Landy Collins pulled up to take me to Aunt Pip’s. He lit a cigarette and checked to see if the headlights were on. His broad shoulders were elevated high above the steering wheel. The side of his face was fragile, like a picture of Egypt.

  The truck picked up speed. And when we got to the stop sign at the end of the road, I thought of the pregnant beagle. She was somewhere lying on her belly in the darkness, coping with the atmosphere as it was. The earth was growing moist underneath her. She had given birth and kept the babies quiet with her milk. Saved by Jesus.

  “Mama says that if you cut down all the trees in Mississippi, you’ll find Negroes from here to kingdom come,” I said.

  “Not just Mississippi,” said Landy Collins, looking through the headlights. “Anywhere you find a tree, there’s a Negro hanging from it. You might not see him, but he’s there.”

  The roaring of cattle was in the air. They came running toward the barbwire fence, back again. Their bodies as loose as a maid in a white man’s kitchen.

  “You want me to touch you?” asked Landy.

  “No.”

  “Yeah, you do,” he said. “You like it when I touch you.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He laughed. “Take off your shoes and put your feet in my lap.”

  I was unsure at first. But there was something about him. I knew not what. This was the part that I had gotten from Mama, the weakness of being ordered.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  By this time he was circling the arch in my foot.

  “I’m too young to trust.”

  “No,” he said, “you just green. Anything green is faithful. It’s been that way since the beginning.”

  His silhouette curved into a gradual slope. I had seen him in a global atlas when I found Uganda with my own finger.

  We were nearing Commitment Road.

  “Ain’t that Fat’s place?” asked Landy.

  “Yeah,” I said, putting my feet back inside my shoes, “how you know Fat?”

  “I used to come out here and stack her up for winter.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “She stopped seeing me as help and started seeing me as a man,” he said.

  “That ain’t reason enough.”

  “It is when a woman that big takes baths outside her house buttass nekked,” he said. “That’s just too much woman for me.”

  Aunt Pip had left the porch light on. The curtains were pulled back, as if she had been waiting for me, lifting herself to the window, listening to the sound of the tires on the road to see if Mama’s car was turning in.

  Landy pulled up in the yard. “Get inside,” he said.

  I stepped down from the truck, leaving him. I felt him watching me as I turned to find him standing beside the Ford, his hand resting on the hood.

  chapter

  seven

  The earth was warm. Mama and I were on our way to Aunt Pip’s when we saw a group of cattle grazing in the open field ahead of us. A white man walked among the cattle with a bucket in his hands. He looked up at the horizon and wiped his brow, sitting the bucket under one of the cow’s stomachs and pulling her nipples. The cow began to kick. He stood up beside her and tried to calm her down.

  Mama saw this and touched her breast with her free hand. “That cow got the sickness,” she said. “You can look at ’er
and tell it. Her milk done went bad, and now her titties sick.”

  The white man put the bucket under the cow’s stomach and squeezed her nipples again. The cow moved its head wildly and broke out into a run that sent it to the far end of the field.

  “Tol’ you,” said Mama.

  We were approaching a stop sign. Across from us was the couple, the husband and wife who had followed Mama and me on Commitment Road. The wife was a stiff woman. Her face was an abstract painting, the mouth barely moving, the teeth upset by a protruding bridge. She looked at her husband, the driver, as if her neck was strictly mechanical. Words came from her tight lips, but he did not respond. He was just as rigid, as if since that day, something horrible had happened between the two of them that drew their feelings apart.

  “I got life in me,” said Mama. “Thank you, Lawd. I got life in me.”

  These are the last words I heard from her before getting out of the car and watching her box-shaped head turn away from Commitment, in the direction of home again.

  Aunt Pip was in the kitchen, facing the rectangular window, looking out into the backyard. The weight was slowly returning to her bones. And the mirrors that I had taken down were up again.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “All the things I missed while I was asleep,” she said.

  The fragile nightgown clung to her. It was white with green stitches along the hem. Her hands were in her lap, the cloth dipping from the burden of them.

  A fly buzzed around us. It landed near the edge of the windowsill. For a moment, it sat there with its wings fluttering, its hind legs like a protractor. The purple eyes, the large pupils.

  “If your titty ever get sick,” said Aunt Pip, “don’t take it to men.”

  Her pattern of breathing forced the fly into the air again. Its wings settled on the kitchen counter, disturbed.