“Nothing,” I said.
He laughed. “Is that what you think?” he said, his hands beside him.
I envisioned myself parting the hairs of his head and sniffing them. I had never seen a man so strong: fingers built like commandments, the details of his shoulders parallel to something unnamed, pressed to the collarbone, strict.
“I wish I owned the world,” I whispered.
His response was quick, as if the bones of an oyster were closing in on his lungs: “No, you don’t,” he said. “The man who owns the world owns all the trouble in it.”
Without thinking, without any reason at all, I walked up to him and pulled my dress down from the shoulders. No one had truly touched me. “Trouble?” I said.
He began to laugh again, before a shadow suddenly appeared in his eyes. He took my hair in his hands and coiled it around his fingertips. “This what you come out here for?” he asked. “To get yourself in trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
He began to sweat now. The liquid was leaving his forehead, crawling down over the tip of his wide, flat nostrils. “I could hurt you,” he said.
He let my hair go and turned his back to me.
“But you wouldn’t,” I said.
The sky began to remove itself. No blue and no God.
Landy Collins walked up to me, pulling the straps back over my shoulders. “You don’t want what you ask me for,” he said.
“But you touched my feet,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “’cause I know the road you on.”
He moved around, his muscles moving forward. “I make boxes for little girls like you,” he said. “Is that what you want? You want me to make a box for you?”
I grew nervous. “No.”
“If you trying to get saved,” he said, “you go to Jesus. I already got one belly pushed up.”
He picked up the chain saw again, turning in the direction of a grown pine tree. The earth was silent. The crickets were no longer chirping. And Fat had slammed the door of her house long ago. I was alone in the world.
As I began to walk away, Landy Collins, without ever turning around, said to me: “Did she ever tell you what they call me?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Fat,” he said.
“No.”
He then turned around, smiling. “They call me the teaser.”
The chain saw began to sound again. And the sun beamed down through the trees, creating a sphere of light that aligned itself in a shadow, peering heavily upon the branches.
chapter
twelve
Aunt Pip had been asleep all day. It was midnight when she finally woke up. She stood in the front door for a moment, her hair covered in a sheet of yellow fabric. The dim light behind her lit up her gown where her legs were poised in a straight line. She closed her eyes and sighed before coming out to sit beside me on the steps, a place we had grown used to.
“Did it rain?” she asked, with one hand over my shoulder.
I felt a pulsating vein in her wrists. This was her living blood, running up through her body in an ordinary pattern. Common, like the laughter of children: a thing of its own dependence.
I looked away from her. The moon was full. It was high above the magnolias, raised in a perfect circle. “It rained a little while,” I said.
She leaned back on the porch, her elbows flat on the boards. Slowly, she began to pull her gown up where a row of bobby pins had bordered the elastic in her panties. She removed the yellow fabric from her head, the blond wig exposed. The hair fell; she lifted it above her neck to tame it. “I live like an old woman,” she said, smiling.
Between the space of our breathing, the whistling leaves of the oak drifted in the night air. The oak stood above the others, muscular and loud. Only this noise overcame us before she spoke under the yellow moonlight.
“Tomorrow,” she said, reaching under her arm. “I go back again.”
She said these words from her stomach where alphabets came from. Not from her voice but from the pit of her abdomen, where her throat was tall and useful.
“I know,” I said.
She stared through the darkness, past the light of the house. With this, she touched the blond wig and put one last pin on the side of her panties, above the others.
“It wasn’t this way the first time,” she said. “I let them cut me.”
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
“It only hurt to wake up,” Aunt Pip said, pausing. “That’s when the mirrors come down.”
How could I have counted every star in the sky that night, the unusually bright one, forming a circle between the others? Was it this way with women? One bright star upon another, each circulating in a pattern of dependence? The gathering of light, one holding the other, in an attitude of sickness, faithful to the earth around it.
The oak whistled louder, although no wind had reached us. Indeed, I had forgotten what it was like to swallow bread during Communion, what it was like to have the taste of Jesus Christ in my mouth, for if His love came in the form of stars, I had missed its glowing altogether.
I was a child of opinion. Every thought created within me, from birth, was like this one bright star, circling the kitchen of my mania, my depression. In this area of consciousness, my house of bereavement, I wondered where Aunt Pip’s missing breast was, if it was labeled beside Willie’s brain. What did men do with something they knew nothing about? There was no balance for a missing thing. It had all gone to the yellow moon, creating within it a beam of glowing pity.
Aunt Pip began to pace the wooden boards, still looking out into the silent darkness with her eyelids erect. “The first time they took my titty,” she said, “I tried to tell your mama. But she wouldn’t listen.”
“What did she do?”
Aunt Pip turned away from the darkness and touched me. “She pushed me,” she said. “She pushed me in the same side where my titty missing.” Her voice stopped reaching for a familiar word: “That’s what hurt most. She couldn’t tell that part o’ me was flat.”
When the whistling of the wide oak stopped, she looked over at a lantern that had been sitting on the porch since the rain. It appeared to be more than a thing of presence. She stretched her arms out and picked it up. “Look at it,” she said.
She sat it back down again and went inside the house. The figure of her waist underneath the gown was disturbing, the shape of her hipbone going upward, linking in the direction of her lungs. She returned with a pair of tweezers and kneeled over the lantern.
“How old is it?” I asked.
She never looked up. Instead, she scraped the mud from the belly of glass. “Since the flood,” she said.
When the clay began to break, she picked up the pieces around her and ate them. With each lump, she looked behind her, as if something was there. That was when a more distinct noise came from the woods. The feet came down harder than rain coming from a cloud. There was pressure on the toes.
“You hear that?” I asked.
She smiled. “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “When you live on Commitment, you hear everything God made.”
The noise grew louder, as if the feet were approaching the porch in the darkness. I pushed myself back against the screen door. “I’m scared.”
“Don’t be,” said Aunt Pip.
She said this so calmly, crushing the red dirt in her fingers and swallowing it. When the sound of the feet stopped, the oak picked up again. One sound to another.
“Ain’t you?” I asked.
“Open your mouth,” she said fearlessly. She had crushed the red dirt into a fine powder in the palm of her hand. “Taste it.”
I did.
This was God. It was different from the cracker of Communion. It tasted of rain. The rain that had fallen off the rooftops of every house in Pyke County had formed a red river of blood. You should have tasted this. I was eating the brightest star in the sky. I was swallowing the taste of God.
“I ain’t scared at
all,” said Aunt Pip, turning her back to me.
She had poured a piece of the earth into my mouth. Without ever realizing it, she had baptized me. She brought the lantern to the house light, as her backbone turned into a shade of blue. When the tweezers were firm in her hands, she twisted the glass from the base and pulled out a tiny piece of paper with the letter “J” written on it.
She stood over me, nursing the paper, flipping it over again and again. She was mesmerized by this object. Nothing alphabetical about it, her stomach rising in the shadow of the light, alive.
“You ever caught the Holy Ghost?” she asked.
“Nome.”
She smiled and held the alphabet up toward the sky. “I have,” she said. “Jesus was inside o’ me. And when I went to touch the hole in His side, He disappeared.”
“Jesus doesn’t have a penis,” I said.
She laughed with her head pulled back. “Every man’s got a burden,” she said. “Doesn’t matter what name he goes by.”
The stars were breaking up. It was possible to move things with the mind. Aunt Pip had done this with her vocabulary. The women were dormant in the sky, aside from their limited fits of laughter, and, in a wave of timeless energy, heard the voice of a sick woman there, on the earth of ignorance, and moved aside to allow her to send forth the powder of dust from her mouth.
“Don’t let them take your hair again,” I said.
She paused over the thing in her hand. “I have to,” she said, one hand over her breast as it hung from her like the octopus of Daddy’s missing arm. “I’ve learned to find myself in other places.”
She was undisturbed, her face looking through the screen door, back at the object.
“How will you get there?” I asked.
She walked to the edge of the porch. Her face, from the side, was outlined in the moon. And when the feet came down through the trees again, she whispered, “Jesus.”
The next morning, I noticed that Aunt Pip’s bed had been fixed. There was no note or sign of her morning activity. She was gone. And Mama was waiting in the front yard with her head to one side, breathing heavily.
chapter
thirteen
Daddy said that his boss, Mr. Sandifer, had a bad case of hay fever; the weather made him irritable. Mama and I were going to the scrap yard to take Daddy some lunch. It was his way of preparing us for the embarrassment he’d suffer from the words of Mr. Sandifer.
Mama pulled into the scrap yard, parking the truck on a patch of broken dust in front of Mr. Sandifer’s office, a boarded-up shack with an iron fan in the window. He prided himself in the scrap yard. I’d see him in town buying tools from the hardware store to add to his collection of hammers, nails, wrenches, and other things that came in handy. He peered through the box-shaped window, opening the door with a string of loose keys chiming from his pocket. The earth was a flaming orange, the sun shone at an angle, down over the bridge of his elongated nose.
“How you doing there, Mr. Sandifer?” asked Mama, pulling the side of her dress like a Spanish lover. Her hair had been dyed a funeral dark, the ends split. “I just came over to bring Chevrolet some hot biscuits from the stove.”
“I figured that,” said Mr. Sandifer. “Come on in.” He didn’t mean it. I could count on one hand the number of times he’d let us in that place. The last time was in the dead of winter and Mama had locked her keys in the car.
“How’s the misses?” asked Mama, putting one hand on her thighbone. The trips to the clothesline hadn’t hardened her muscles.
“Doing just fine,” he said. His fingers were smooth around the tips. The most work he’d had in them was closing the office door to go home to his wife.
“It’s awfully busy this season,” said Mama. She had begun to pull the bonnet closer to her scalp, down over her crawling hair. That bad hair that shrank in the rain and the sun drew the grease out of.
“It seems so,” he said, looking more like the color of Missouri on Miss Diamond’s United States of America map. A pink-flamingo color that curved into the cloth of a pregnant woman’s belly.
He shuffled through the papers on his desk, swearing at a fly that buzzed around his head. “Chevrolet,” he yelled, “your folks here.”
He hated niggers hanging around the place. He had that air about him: the look in his eyes when Mama raised her arms to her hips, the manner in which he covered his mouth thereafter, shifting the mucus to one nostril or another with his smooth hands.
“I’m coming,” said Daddy, watching us through the small rectangular window.
“It is time for a break, ain’t it Mr. Sandifer?” asked Mama. She had worked hard for white folks all her life. She said that she never ate inside any of their houses because they could see the nigger in her lips. She ate on the back porch with the hounds.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Sandifer, looking down at his watch, “I reckon.”
He walked to the window and tapped the glass to get Daddy’s attention again. Daddy looked up at him and nodded his head.
“Mighty kind o’ you sir,” said Mama.
She pushed me through the back door, where Daddy had begun to put down his tools, stretching his one good arm in the heat. “What you got for me today?” he asked.
Mr. Sandifer’s face was disfigured through the screen door as his wrists went up and down, finally resting on a Life magazine. He coiled it in his hands and came down on the top of the desk, raising it again and again with an effort to kill the buzzing fly.
Mama patted her chest and waited for Daddy to sit on the edge of the porch. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, his skin reddened in the sun. “I got you some buttermilk biscuits and lemonade,” said Mama.
“How’s it going, Maddy?” asked Daddy. He looked at me as if embarrassed that he was my father and worked for a white man who talked down to him sometimes.
“All right,” I said.
Jesus had cracked his front tooth a couple of weeks ago. Daddy said that Jesus didn’t take silver. He took gold. The morning that it happened, Daddy took a slab of hog meat to the pool hall. He called himself making up for a big bet he made with some hustlers from Chicago. He told Jesus that the meat was boneless. But Jesus didn’t care. He told Daddy to stay away from Factory Road with that shit. They say that Daddy stood there blessing that hog meat and taking a jar full of silver coins from his pocket. He told Jesus that the meat was good and the silver would last him a long time. They say Daddy took his eyes off Jesus. That’s what happened to him.
“Maddy,” said Daddy, taking a sip from the glass of lemonade, “you always leaving me. Sometimes I forget what you look like.”
Mama interrupted, “Eat up, now, Chevrolet.”
“We ain’t hurting nobody, baby,” said Daddy. He cut the biscuits down the center with his hunting knife. The grease had hardened on the sausage. He scraped it off and slid the knife inside the biscuit. “Just leave it alone, now.”
He began to eat the biscuits while looking up at the sky. The clouds were brewing ahead. It was an eerie summer. Things were much different now. He was tired of working for Mr. Sandifer, listening to him talk about how he should have cracked that nigger’s skull who chipped his tooth up like that.
Mama felt him drifting away: “We due a storm by Sunday,” she said. “Must be why it’s been so hot these last few days.”
“The world’s coming to an end,” said Daddy.
A scarecrow hung above the motors in the scrap yard. It was stuffed with straw and erected from a flag pole, hanging in a dead man’s clothes—a flannel button-down oxford and overalls. It had been there before I had learned to crawl, lifeless and hitched to a field pulley in the middle of the scrap yard.
“Faye,” said Mr. Sandifer, looking out through the screen door, “I need some work done around the house this Sunday, if you don’t mind.”
Daddy looked up from the biscuits and tried to keep a calm voice about him. A white man had called his wife by her first name. “But I haven’t missed a day of wor
k,” he said. “I’ve been here every day for the past couple o’ weeks.”
Mr. Sandifer opened the screen door and stepped onto the front porch. “I know, Chevrolet,” he said. “My Lucille needs some extras done around the house, n’ I figured Faye here wouldn’t mind doing the work. That is, since I was so kind as to give you that helping o’ cornmeal from Pillar’s last Thursday.”
Mama sensed the tension between them. “Yes, sir,” she said, “I don’t mind obliging the misses. It’s quite all right.”
Mr. Sandifer pulled a pear from his pocket and bit into it. His false teeth moved against his gums. “I hope you don’t mind, Chevrolet,” he said sarcastically.
Daddy lowered his chin. The sweat dripped from the curve in his face onto the biscuits. “No, sir, Mr. Sandifer,” he said. “I don’t mind.”
It was worse than betting on a losing horse. Or the cockfights when the dead rooster was thrown across the fence, his head turned sideways, open-eyed. Or the raccoon-on-the-log when the hound lost and went home with its owner. He gave Jesus everything: his money, Mama’s working hands, his manhood, his pride, everything, although it was just as much his fault as Jesus’.
“I don’t mind at all,” repeated Daddy, putting the biscuits down and turning away. The heat came up from the dust, blending the oil in his hair with the scent of the earth.
“You’d best be getting back to work soon,” added Mr. Sandifer.
Mama rubbed her shoulders as Mr. Sandifer went inside. He made her nervous: the thread of her dress pressed deeper into her flesh, flattened out by her rough hands. Because Jesus wouldn’t take ham or silver. Only gold.
“We’ll be going now,” she said. She picked up the basket and kissed Daddy on the brow. She stood there awhile, watching him walk back to an abandoned radiator and pick up one of his tools. “You hear me, Chevrolet?”
He carried my baby picture around in his back pocket so long that it had formed a ragged square patch in his jeans. It was odder than a grown man inside a Radio Flyer for a gambler to care about something, anything. We talked, but I hardly saw that part of him. Only during Easter when he poured the jelly beans out on the kitchen table and gave me all the purple ones.
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