“No more history in my house, Maddy,” he yelled, looking up from the radiator and smiling at me like he did that night he told me he’d felt his missing arm again, lighting the tip of his cigar and throwing the match into the air.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I saw the regret in his eyes, the confusion of giving a man his life.
Mr. Sandifer leaned against the screen door. He raised the delicate bones in his hand to the river of blood in his chest. His eyes were on the scarecrow, the pulley’s force lifting the backbone. The rare occasions when the rain wilted the haywire and he had to jab a pitchfork between the cotton in its oxford.
“Sunday be just fine,” said Mama. The figs came out in lumps. This is what bothered her now. Not the work, come Sunday, that would soak her hair fuzzier than a Georgia peach.
Mr. Sandifer’s office door had fallen apart over the years. The fibers from the screen door frayed outward. “All’s fair,” he said, fanning himself with the pages of Life.
The truck wouldn’t start at first. Mama prayed over the wheel. “Lawd, Jesus,” she whispered, “if the devil ain’t got one more thing on his mind.”
She waited a minute.
“Try it now, Mama.”
“Hol’ on, Maddy.” She pulled the tail of her dress above her knees, pressing down on the gas pedal. The motor caught.
Daddy watched us from the side of Mr. Sandifer’s office. He was a whole man, regardless of his ties to Jesus, the drinking, and the thinning hair on his chest. But his manhood had been buried, paralyzed.
Mama put her arm over the edge of the seat and backed out of the scrap yard. Daddy had lost the gas cap somewhere between the pool hall and the back roads of the county. An oil rag had taken its place; it flew high in the rearview mirror, stuffed into the hole where the fumes took over the surrounding things: the pasture, the cow manure, the worm, the things that ate the worm.
“I hope this heat let up,” said Mama as she pulled the bonnet from her head and shook the split ends out of it. “It’s taking my hair out.”
The Negroes worked in the field. They cut away at the weeds: most of them standing with a wishbone in their backs, turning their straw hats downward, away from the sun. A line of barbwire fenced them in for miles. They were melting.
“Why’s everybody so scared o’ Jesus?” I asked.
The cross dangled from the rearview mirror. Its still-clean surface formed a smooth bend around the edges. Mama held it firmly, whispering about the figs with her driving hand on the wheel.
“I don’t think we really ’fraid o’ Jesus,” she said. “We just owe him something—the same way we pay the ’lectric company to keep the lights on.”
“You don’t know Jesus, Ma.”
She snapped. “I do know Jesus!” she said. “It don’t matter if he don’t wear no robe or nothing. We owe him. And if he don’t get what’s owed him, your daddy be in his grave ’fore we can say amen.”
The barbwire had run out, the Negroes long gone. And the bonnet in Mama’s lap was curdled, still. The hairs of her head crawling again.
chapter
fourteen
I had that summer flu. All I could do was lie under the covers and trace the circles of dust on my wallpaper. I heard voices in the kitchen: Mama’s and two other women. They opened their mouths to speak, the sounds of flesh rising.
“That boy with the loose head,” said the first voice. “You know the one.”
They sipped away at their coffee. One pausing to lead the conversation. Another to control it.
“Who?” asked Mama, her voice fading into a whisper.
They all whispered now.
“God as my witness,” said the second voice, returning.
“When this happen?” asked Mama between the two.
The first voice sipped her coffee, the liquid still spiraling. “Early this morning,” she said. “On Commitment.”
Mama paused. “Lawd, have mercy,” she said. “Ain’t nothing out there but a headache. When the service?”
“I don’t know, child,” said the first voice. “You know they keep black folks out longer than they do whites.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” said the second voice.
“Yeah,” said Mama, “I heard they keep the bones too.”
“What you say?” said the first voice.
Mama raised her voice now. “That’s what I hear tell,” she said. “They keep the bones for scarecrows.”
The other voices laughed. “That’s the fanciest thing we ever heard!”
“That’s just what I hear tell,” said Mama. “They use them bones to draw the crows out there.”
“Where?” said the first voice.
“Out to the scrap yard and so on,” said Mama.
“Now, I done heard a lot o’ things,” said the second voice. “But I ain’t never heard of no white man saving a nigger’s bones.”
“What they do with the heart?” asked one of them.
“They give it to the dogs,” said Mama.
“Who you telling,” said the second voice.
“Anyhow,” said the first voice, “they say that boy was coming from Commitment when Diamond hit ’im.”
“That’s what I hear tell too,” said the second.
“Well,” said Mama, “reckon Landy gone have to use the wood from the hog pen. It’s already fixed for death.”
“That boy was cursed from the get-go,” said one of them. “Him and his folks dying the same way—machines.”
“What his granddaddy gone do?” said Mama. “He so used to praying over everybody else.”
“Ain’t that the gospel,” said the first voice. “Not one soul in Pyke County prayed up enough to bless the deacon.”
They all sipped.
“It’s all in the Lawd’s will,” said Mama.
With this, they pushed the chairs out from under them, talking about Commitment Road and the killing. One car pulled out and I finally saw Miss Roberta Christian walking across the road to her father’s house, her hands in the air.
Willie was dead.
A week later, I walked down the aisle of Owsley Sanctified Church—a place I had not visited since my sin of putting a naked lady on the first page of Genesis. The walls were filled with a darkness that sloped into a fragile, open-ended backbone. That emptiness that God took no part in. They were all sinners, whispering about the boy with the loose head and how that white man’s motor had knocked him clean through the air.
The pastor leaned over Mr. Rye, telling him about how he needed some carpet in the place. “The church folk ain’t been paying their tithes,” he said, running a wide finger across his face. “Jesus getting mighty dark around the edges.”
They said that Mr. Diamond left Willie on the side of the road. Willie had worked for him all his life, stocking the post office into some type of order. Mr. Diamond knew that Willie Patterson had a loose head and didn’t know the difference between a Cadillac motor and a Ford. He thought they were all the same. His granddaddy had always taught him to ride his bike against the traffic so the cars could see him coming. He was paranoid about something happening to him.
Landy Collins looked tired, sitting there in the front row. He had been up all night fashioning the pine into a rectangle, carving the insides of the tree out and aborting it in the woods somewhere. I sat in the bench behind him, watching his head slowly lean backward from the deep sleep that overtook him.
The casket was closed, and I didn’t see one flower. They say that when Mr. Diamond hit Willie, the blood darkened the earth. Willie didn’t see him because he had a loose head. The papers said it was an accident. Mr. Diamond was blinded by the fog and didn’t see Willie on the bike. He didn’t see that grown-ass nigger riding that bike with those Chuck Taylors because the fog was thick on Commitment Road.
The church windows on each side of the aisle gave air to a wide ray of light over Jesus. The choir began to talk about Willie: the casket would be not open but closed, because
his grandfather couldn’t take the gossip going into the ground with him.
Suddenly, I remembered my grandmother’s words, words that had become buried underneath a stream of urine from a sick woman’s bladder: “Never forget the man who teaches you how to open your mouth. You and him talk the same language. You are one. Nobody else will know him like you know him. You are two people from the same spirit. You are one.” Everything had come to me: Miss Diamond shooing Willie away from the window that day after school because she did not want him to tell me. Because she knew that he had seen her husband, Mr. Diamond, pull back the hairs on Laurel Pillar’s head and rape her; a woman always knows when her sheets are dirty. I wasn’t waiting on the world to apologize to me. She was. And on those nights when Mr. Diamond kissed the cleanliness from her, after a night of talking about the Chevys and Fords, she knew that she had smelled the rape of a woman on his breath: the same way I had torn Hitler out of the history books because I knew how many Jews he’d killed. The world was inside of her now. It went down from Mr. Diamond’s penis to her vagina. She was carrying around a rape inside of her. Her husband had been fed the milk of a rapist. Somewhere, racing on a wire of thoughts in Big Mama’s head, she had trusted that God would protect the black baby in her arms, that although she had been fed the same milk, He would spare her the taste of the rapist—for she had already paid the price. But the other baby, the white one, she had forgotten to pray for, the spoiled milk traveling through the text of his stomach and absorbing him.
Yeah, Miss Diamond had felt that day coming, the day when she could no longer keep Willie from telling the truth, the moment her husband would run down a boy with a loose head and kill him. Because the doctors had not taken away Willie’s common sense: what it was to hear a woman scream because a man’s penis was shattering the glass in her throat.
The law found Willie’s body on the wrong side of the road. It wasn’t facing the traffic like his grandfather had taught him, and since no one saw what happened, they took Diamond’s word: he had blamed it on the fog. Now Willie lay in a casket with the sun shining through the northern window of the church, marinating his body into the pine.
Landy had done a good job on Willie. There was room in there for Willie. He had paid attention to Willie. He knew that a man Willie’s size never would have fit into a narrow box. He didn’t use the boards of the hog pen. He went deep into the woods and closed his eyes to think about the shoulders, the large head, the arms, the fat around the waist, the unusual circumstances that would go into that box. Everything had been taken into account. The way Willie kept his head to the side all the time, the low self-esteem of a man who worked long through the night for a bag of potato chips and a soda, the way he combed his hair to the side when the sun was going down; everything Willie had ever been was inside that box.
The flu had left me. Mama stayed home to prepare the food. She knew that Willie was nothing but dead. She had rutabagas to sit, and there was nothing she could do about a nigger with a dead scorpion on his mind.
The pastor tapped Landy on the shoulder. He woke suddenly and apologized for falling asleep before service. He looked around, and when he saw me sitting there, he did nothing. He was a grown man. I was a child who saw too much in him. I could never have him. He looked at me that way. I had some growing up to do, long after being a witness to a sickness and passing history.
The choir stood for the opening prayer: the white Jesus hung over them. His hands were nailed to the cross, His blue eyes downward, viewing the hole in His side. The church was barren, only a few pictures of Jerusalem and some artificial flowers in the podium vase. They were all talking about my sin. I knew it. I felt the countless eyes at my back, thickening into a bowl of brown sugar that glazed my skin into a fine, well-treaded syrup. It was not about the church tithes and the maroon carpet the pastor needed to match the choir’s robes. It was about the death of a bastard and a sinner’s fire-engine-red lipstick. It was about a child sent to take care of a whore who couldn’t get into hell if she tried.
“Lawd,” said the pastor, “we’re gathered here today to celebrate the life of Brother Willie Patterson.” He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his L-shaped sideburns. His three-piece suit was the color of homemade wine after the grapes had soured and turned burgundy. “I say ‘celebrate’ because it’s the omega. We are to rejoice at a man’s end and forgive the unjust. Listen to me now. I said we are to forgive the unjust.” He wiped his mouth now, eyes closed. “Can I get an amen?” The church went Amen.
“Folks,” he said, “it was so hard for the Lawd to forgive us that He had to send His Son. He couldn’t do it all by Hisself.” He opened his eyes to the sunlight now, pulling his trousers over the fat in his gut. “Can I get an amen?” The church went Amen. “How can you love the Lawd and hate your neighbor? You don’t have a choice in forgiveness. No repentance. No God. Do you hear me talking to you now?” He spoke in tongues. The church hears him. They say they hear him. “Ain’t no such thing as half. Half what? Half hell?” He laughed a little, pointing his finger to the floor. “’Cause lemme tell you something, folks. You walk ’round here filling your head with disease, I guarantee you hell is the only thing you gone get. All hell. Not no half hell. Ain’t no such thing as that.” The church went Amen. “Don’t come up in Owsley acting a fool, now. I know the sinners. I know ’em all. I got they address. I got they first and last names. And if you ain’t heard nothing about my Jesus, then let me tell you. I got Him right here.” He picked up the Bible and traced the letters with his fingers, showing it to the choir, then to the crowd. “Guess what, church? I know where you’re going. It ain’t hard. Do you hear me talking to you now?” The church went Amen.
Landy Collins moved around with the edge of his ears flattening out. He had seen my breasts. He was glad that he had left me standing there. I was a young sinner. I had time to fuck up and pray about it, but he knew better. He knew that it was wrong to stretch out my hole so close to a sick house.
“Let us pray here for Brother Willie and his elder, the deacon,” he said, holding out his hand to the crowd. At the same time, Miss Birch, the bus driver, walked in carrying a vase of lilies. “Come on up here and join me, Deacon.”
The church folk turned around. Out came a fragile man, Willie’s grandfather, the gray in his eyes bordered by cataracts. He held on to the arms of the benches, taking his slow time down the aisle; the suit cloth dragged him down as he reached midways of the small church. The front seat was cold, save the flesh of Landy Collins moving around to check the measurements of the box, to make sure Willie was comfortable enough in there.
“Let us pray,” said the pastor, helping Willie’s grandfather to the podium. “Lawd, give us the strength to overcome the evil over this place. I don’t know much about Brother Willie here, but I can pray that heaven is the place for him. Heavenly Father, watch over the deacon this morning. He tired, Lawd. He need you, Lawd. I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t know so myself. Help us, Heavenly Father. In your namesake, we pray. Amen.”
The choir sang:
It’s gonna rain.
It’s gonna rain.
The pastor’s wife hollered. She fell against a man who didn’t know what to do with her. The ushers immediately ran to her side, fanning her and pulling her dress down. Jesus was there. Nobody but Jesus owned Mississippi. There wasn’t enough dirt and holes in the graveyard to keep up with the bodies out there, the ghosts hanging from the trees, the sinners.
Lawd, you better get ready.
’Cause it’s gonna rain.
Miss Birch didn’t know what to do with herself. A sober woman with Jesus so apparently missing from her life. Her hands disturbed her. She couldn’t train them. The devil was inside them, spreading the nerves of her sobriety through the vase of Willie’s lilies.
God sho’ll know the rainbow sign
It won’t be water, but fire next time.
Pyke County, Mississippi. A place where the dead lived. Th
e road so long and rugged that time became a blur. Cold things lived there. People with thin blood and love enough for survival. Nothing else.
The clouds moved ahead. We took the pine box out to the cemetery and lowered it into the ground. The only men who knew the truth were dead now, including Uncle Sugar. A man without a voice is a dead man. He opened my mouth and gave me the word. And I, in turn, gave it to Jesus.
chapter
fifteen
It was early morning. Mama stood near the mailbox talking to Mr. Diamond. His hands were behind his back, propped at the waistline. The truck’s motor hummed behind him. Mama patted him on the shoulder as he looked out past her, out into the earth, nodding.
What would he have done had I asked him to open his mouth? Had I lain him on a metal table and stuck a tube into the opening in his esophagus and drained Big Mama’s milk out of him? I wanted to dissect him. It was his body that I’d traced out of the encyclopedia. The modeled structure was shaped like him, the narrow figure, the ribs of his chest tunneling beneath the shoulders, the yellow arms bent at the elbows as if he had been holding an infant. His lips were perched. He could not loose the Negro breast from his mouth. After all these years, it was still there, covering the light in his face, flesh-heavy.
Mama asked something of him. And he turned around, lifting his shirt from the backside. He pointed toward his kidneys. Mama put her hands on his back and nodded. And before they separated, he reached out his hand to her. She patted it and began to walk back toward the house with her head down.
She was in the kitchen now, moving something around. And when I met her there, she slowly opened her mouth. “Diamond got a worm in his back,” she said. “We gotta get to praying ’fore it split him up from the inside.”
She picked up the mason jar that housed the lizard and opened the lid. The lizard began to climb the glass, its neck coming up from the surface. Mama put her finger on top of it. The unbalanced body, the pulse of its throat vibrated. She pushed it back down and closed the jar. “If your daddy come,” she said, “tell him I went to pray for a kidney.”
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