The killers spoke at one time, moving aside to let Daddy see the hog up close. One of them looked down at me. His teeth were straight, and when he opened his mouth, it wasn’t hard to tell that his wisdoms were missing. A tall man whose strength showed in his arms. “This you, Chevrolet?” he asked.
Daddy turned away from the hog and smiled at me. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s me.”
“It ain’t hard to tell,” the man said, pushing his thin sleeves up to the elbows. “What part of that hog you want?”
“The eyes,” I said, looking into his mouth, the smoothness of his tongue against his throat.
“You can’t do nothing with the eyes,” he said. “They ain’t got no meat in ’em.”
The hog squealed. And when one of the other men moved away from Daddy, I saw it, the quiet eyes, the mouth hanging. It was as nude as Mama. The small feet, the way the gut hung over the pelvis, lost.
I looked up at the man with the wisdom teeth missing. He laughed and folded his arms as if he controlled my vocabulary. “What you gone do if you take them eyes home and they just get up and walk off?”
“Find out where they’re going,” I said.
All the men laughed. The other men laughed and held their bellies and grabbed their killing hats. The man with the missing wisdoms leaned toward me. “Well,” he said, “hogs ain’t got no nerves. So you ain’t got that to worry about.”
The hog started to whine, and the man with the missing wisdoms ran over to the pen. They began to measure the feet, the head. One of the other other men made a square with his hands. The others watched him, how the space between his fingers was too far apart for them to agree.
“Where Jolie?” asked Daddy to another one of the killers, who’d tagged his keys on to his pants. You could hear them against his thighbone, chiming in the same kept rhythm of a man whose patience was in the middle of his body.
“Inside,” said the man with the keys.
Daddy turned his back to the pen. “Well,” he said, “go get him.”
The man with the keys looked at him strangely. “How much you paying?”
The other other men grew silent. They knew that Daddy’s word didn’t count. And when Daddy felt the tension around him, he looked up at the oak, the widespread limbs.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Me and Jolie got a understanding.”
“You better,” said the man with the keys. “Don’t take nothing you can’t pay for.”
“Nigger,” said Daddy, pulling out a row of dollar bills, “I got money.”
At that time, Mr. Jolie walked out of the house. He was a quiet man but moved with a harshness about him. He was a man who’d built his own nest. For this reason, he was respected in Pyke County. When you saw a man like that walk upon the earth, you had no choice but to respect his actions, the calm manner in which he timed his movements, perfect, detailed movements.
“She ready,” said the man with the keys. The other men stood around him, their blurry faces melting into the clouds.
“All right,” said Mr. Jolie. He walked toward the John Deere.
One of the blurry men shoved Daddy in the side. “Ain’t she pretty,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Daddy, “that’s a fine lady.”
The men watched Mr. Jolie. They envied him.
“By the time I saved up for some shit like that,” said the man with the keys, “I’d be so old I couldn’t even shift the bastard.”
“But you could still climb on top of ’er,” said one of the blurry men.
They all laughed. Mr. Jolie looked back at them, his back to the seat of the John Deere with his feet on the gears. When he approached the hog pen, the men walked over to meet him.
Mama was somewhere pulling the bed across the room, rearranging it to suit Daddy. He had seen her in the light. She didn’t want him to remember any part of her flesh. This was what she felt. A man who saw you naked, in a moment when you least expected it, would run away. It was as safe to move the furniture, to clear his mind of her nudity, as it was to drown out the voice of an unwanted bird.
“Aw, hush up!” said the man with the molars as the hog rammed its head into the gate.
The pen was so very small. They had built it to fit the body of the dead. The perfect measurements: a space of an inch or so bigger than the hog’s width, the wood stacked up above the length of the bones in its neck, closed in, captured, and fed until the body grew into its own healthy death.
“Let’s go,” said one of the other other men.
And as calm and quiet and hardworking as Mr. Jolie was, he climbed into the pen with the hog, took out a knife that would’ve reached my kidney from a small distance, and slit the hog’s throat. He slit and slit and slit until that hog stopped squealing and its head fell over the blade. The blood came running down from its body like that of the dead bird, primitive and loose.
“All right,” said Daddy, “move out of the way so we can jack ’im up!”
The man with the keys signaled for me to move. The hog’s body lay in the mud, its head separate from its neck, the eyes open, still.
I stepped back only to notice Mr. Jolie’s daughter behind an orange curtain, the tails of her hair hanging behind her ears. She’d been watching the men, as I had. And when she saw the blood on her father’s clothes, she disappeared.
One of the blurry men backed the tractor up to the body, while the man with the keys climbed up on the pen and hooked a pulley to the oak. The ropes of the pulley made a dark noise, as if it knew the importance of its use.
“I got it,” said the man with the missing wisdoms.
One of the other men hitched the hog up to the tractor and dragged it out of the pen. The man with the keys tied the hog’s feet with the rope. When finished, he tugged on the rope to make sure the pulley was stable. He stood there with Daddy and the others debating over the amount of intestines and cheese and ham and chitterlings and cracklings and bacon they could each get from the kill. Mr. Jolie said he’d take off for the help.
“Good,” said the man with the keys.
They crowded the hog.
“Come here,” said Daddy, reaching his arm out of the group to touch me. The other men stepped to the side. Daddy pointed to the hog’s ass. “That’s a good load of ham there,” he said. “We can eat another year off that.”
The kill had recovered him. He looked at the hog’s eyes, the sadness in them, and smiled. It was more innocent than the first. The first hog had done a terrible thing. It deserved to be killed. But this hog had done nothing. It gave a man more pleasure to disrupt innocence. It gave him power.
“The eyes,” I said to him, “they’re movin’.”
“Naw,” said the man with the keys, “he ain’t bothered.”
One of the other men said, “And his brain the size of a pea.”
It was like a murderer telling the man he killed why he killed him and how easy it was for him to get away with it. “You still want the eyes?” said the man with the missing wisdoms.
Daddy touched me on the spine. “No,” he said.
I backed away from him and the others. The man with the keys climbed on top of the tractor and shifted until the rope on the pulley began to tighten. The hog’s body slowly lifted, his feet bound. Before long, the hog was hung in midair, the blood dripping from the widespread oak onto the ground.
“Where your ol’ lady?” Daddy asked Mr. Jolie.
“She at the in-laws,” he said.
“You mind if Maddy wait inside till we get done here?” asked Daddy.
Mr. Jolie looked at me: “How ol’ are you?”
“Fourteen,” I said.
He looked up at the orange curtains. His daughter was standing there with her hair in her hands. “Come down now,” he said, as if he were coaxing a cat down from a high branch.
“Go on, Maddy,” said Daddy with his knuckles in my back.
“Yes, sir.”
They walked back to the hog. I watched them as I trailed backward t
o the back door of the house. The man with the missing wisdoms lit a cigarette and walked away from the others. As soon as I opened the door, I saw Mr. Jolie’s daughter sitting cross-legged in a wooden chair. Her blind eye just as white as a bar of lye soap.
She didn’t say anything. Those long tails of hair hung over her ears. She didn’t think I was my daddy’s child. My skin was too bright and clear. She looked at me that way like she wanted to ask me who my daddy was and what the hell was I doing in her house. I didn’t know what to do. I took a seat in front of her on a brown sofa covered with a hand-stitched quilt.
The house was beautiful. You never realize how dull your house is until you go visit somebody who took pride in theirs. Mr. Jolie and his wife took great pride in their house. Every certificate their daughter had ever won was nailed to the walls. Small things completed them. A picture of a man with scarred fingers holding a baby. Two candles on the mantel held by iron stars. Black life-size dolls at the head of the kitchen table. Big lips painted in a bright red. Pillows on the couch with the names of Jesus, Moses.
“What you looking at me for?” said Mr. Jolie’s daughter. Her legs were still crossed, the patches on her knees elephant-dark.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You looking at my eye,” she said. Her voice was strong, as if she had been born before. Some old tree was missing its roots. They were inside her lungs.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yeah,” she said, “you looking at it.”
“My daddy sent me in here to wait for him,” I said. “I’m not looking at your eye.”
She uncrossed her legs. Her panties had a red spot in them where the lips spread apart. “Oh,” she said.
“How come you never talk on the bus?” I asked.
“You so stupid,” she said with her elbows on her knees. “You think ’cause people don’t talk, they lazy.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yeah, you do,” she said. “Like people who don’t say ‘Mississippi’ all the way.”
The men outside laughed loudly.
“You ever save the eyes?” I asked.
“Where’m I gonna put them?” She knew what I was talking about. She moved like she had tried to save the eyes herself.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t even know what you talking ’bout.”
“What’s it to you?” I asked.
“A lot, if you want me to tell you the truth,” she said, sitting up like she was mechanical. “Miss Diamond pass you?”
“Yep.”
“I wouldn’t have,” she said, falling back into the wooden chair in deep breaths. “You can’t talk to grown folks like that.”
Grown men were out behind her house killing a hog. That’s what grown folks did. The men who called themselves men. They raised and fed a pig and changed its name to hog and killed it. “I can spell Mississippi backwards.”
“What you telling me for?” she said. She stood up from the chair and walked into the kitchen. “You thirsty?” she yelled.
“No.”
“I am,” she said, before turning on the faucet and running up a row of stairs with her feet hitting hard on her father’s work. When she came back down, she had a crystal glass in her hands. “This is my favorite glass. My grandma gave it to me before she died.”
“How old is it?”
It took awhile before I realized that I had turned completely around on the sofa, staring at her white eye.
“Crystal don’t age,” she said with a deep frown. “You know that?”
Imagine being left something that never aged. Every time you picked it up and used it and looked at it, it’d be the same age. I wanted to hold that glass in my hands as I sat there with my back to the certificates and watched her gulp down most of the water. How beautiful it was to watch her eye through that glass that her grandma had given her. So very beautiful. “No,” I said.
There was a small level of water left in the glass. She slowly poured it down the sink, running back up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” I yelled.
“I’m going to hell, Maddy Dangerfield,” she said, laughing loudly. “I’m going to hell!”
She never came back down the stairs. And I sat there looking out the window of her house, watching the hog, gutted now. Justice Bates had been killed like this: the rope pulled tightly around the bones in his neck, the position of his face on the pulley, his arms tied around his back, the Mississippi branches forming a vein behind him.
chapter
seventeen
Mama was at the side of the house hoeing up a new row for the garden. A white scarf was tied around her head, covering her crawling hair. She was a long-winded woman when it came to her work. Anything less was senseless. The signs of Deuteronomy were there, changing her, shaping her into an obedient wife. She had come to terms with her illiterate husband, the choice she had made when she was too young to know the difference. And that her tongue was a muscle of its own actions. She had taught Daddy the vocabulary of the liquor labels. But in the meantime, she had chosen to neglect that while she was teaching him the language, she was accepting his alphabetical solitude: she had given him the ceremony of alcoholism; he was no longer married to her but to his handicap. She had become his mother, showing him the colors of stop signs and grocery-store commodities to help him cheat himself out of belonging to a literate world.
She had pulled up a full row of earth. By now she was walking behind her work and spreading the seeds of tomatoes from a brown paper bag. She had moved the furniture in her bedroom again. This is what she did when the pain got to her: she moved things.
The hoe began to dig into the ground again. She kneeled beside the second row’s beginning and smiled. She measured its width alongside the first with her foot and went back into the ground, the iron hoe swinging blades of glass. Just over her head was a singing sparrow. Its body was like hers, like the bird in the window the morning of her speechlessness. The flat feet hooked on a bracket of thin lumber, the wide mobility of the stomach. For a brief moment, she looked up at it, one hand on her hip, as she began to hum:
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me.
The hoe went back into the ground. Daddy was coming around the corner of the house with the red gas can. He shook it and looked into the rubber nozzle for any traces of gasoline. When the effect displeased him, he sat the can alongside the second row and paused.
Mama went into her bosom and pulled out a set of folded dollar bills. She straightened them out and counted each one with a wet thumb. Daddy pointed toward Factory. His hair was tinted with a touch of mahogany where the sun had begun to singe it. “Give it here!” he yelled, as if Mama had aggravated him.
He was already disgusted by the empty jar above the stove. It was the first sign of her distrust in him. Her faith in God was growing, and he could sense that the moment would come when she would no longer keep her money in jars, her bosom, or anywhere else, because God would show her the destruction of a gambling man. Daddy snatched the dollar bills out of her hand and put them in his back pocket.
He picked up the gas can and trampled off.
“Don’t spend it all,” yelled Mama. “You hear me?”
She started to hum again, looking up for the potbellied sparrow in the trees. It was gone. But nonetheless, the glass vase in her throat tingled on the waves of heat around her. The feeling of someone staring at her caused her to look directly into the window. She stopped hoeing and closed her mouth. Her eyes were opened wide, the sun’s glare burning them. She was beginning to feel something.
With a silent motion, she looked toward the kitchen window and called me to her.
Everything came into view: the perfect matted lime-colored prints left by the wooden boards of the hog pen, the heap of ants crawling in the dirt behind her with Daddy’s footprint still in it, the limb where the bird had flown away and left it trembling.
Mama lowered her jaw, a
s if to let the air of the earth into her mouth. She put weight on the hoe. She was vast, her hips spread flat, the pelvis hidden. She handed me the brown paper bag and began to hoe again. Where she pulled up the earth, I planted the seeds. Now I was in her footsteps again. The bones that formed sentences, words that were invisible, paralyzing.
Grandma was near. And I thought about the morning of her death: the green shoes dangling from Mama’s hand, how she did not call for the coroner until many hours later, after rigor mortis had set in to Grandma’s body; her telling me how she laid upon Grandma’s chest where the sick milk of her breasts made her cold, bare.
Mama was putting the hoe on the ground now. She sat down beside it and called me to her: “Come here,” she said.
She touched the flesh of her stomach and spread her legs out. I put my head in her lap. For a moment, neither one of us spoke. But her mouth was opened to the heat of the sun, and the fumes from her body were beginning to rise.
She opened my mouth with her fingers.
Her hands were carved by mankind. All of her life she had been cleaning white folks’ houses, burping their babies, and folding down the covers of their lives. Her life was not important. This, she be lieved, as the surface of her fingertips grew more and more rigid, coated with the work of duty on them. From time to time, she hid them from me yet believed that a woman’s hands were her glory. I had found myself, several times, watching her large body lying still on the pillows of her bedroom, her lips like large caterpillars moving across her shadow in a wall of moonlight, her nose flat, her nose wide. These hands I most wanted to touch, to open the map of her duty in them. I wanted to eat the juniper from them, suck it out from the bone. But when I came close, the instinct of being a woman set in, and she woke up to find me standing over her, as she had her own mother, with my mouth at her fingertips.
Now she was pulling my face to her nose, smelling my breath. Then she relaxed my head again. The sparrow was singing on another branch, another world. “You don’t have my milk in your mouth,” she said.
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