Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  “I’m Jinx,” she said.

  “I’m Evalina,” I said.

  She nodded. “Are you a lady or a girl?”

  I had to smile. “A lady, I guess.” I was ten years older than she.

  “Are you a nurse?”

  “No, I’m a patient,” I said. “Or a resident, I guess I should say, on my way to getting out of the hospital. I’ve got a job playing the piano for their programs.”

  She lit up. “I can sing,” she said. “Dance, too.”

  “Well, you just might get a chance to do that,” I told her. “They’re big on that here.”

  Still sitting straight up on the bed like an advertisement for perfect posture, Jinx stared at me intently. “You are going to be my friend,” she said. “I need one. I have to make friends and have increased socialization and pass a lot of tests to get out of here. And not set fire to my bed and not hit anybody. You think I can do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You want some of this popcorn?”

  “Sure.” I perched gingerly upon the edge of her bed, and we finished it up together.

  JINX WAS DYING to tell her own story, which was completely different from the police record I had overheard in the alcove at Graystone, though in a way, both stories were true. Her mother, had she lived, might have offered another; certainly her aunt and uncle had stuck to their own angry narrative. Perhaps any life is such: different stories like different strands, each distinct in itself, each true, yet wound together to form one rope, one life. I couldn’t say. I don’t know why they all told them to me, either. Dr. Schwartz suggested that I’m a good listener—maybe that’s like being a good accompanist.

  Anyhow, this is Jinx’s version.

  Though born into a “good family,” Jinx’s mother was “never right,” causing that family no end of trouble and embarrassment before she ran away with the Irish tinker and musician Kirvin Feeney, traveling all over the South in his specially built wagon, like a little house, pulled by two horses named Dan and Grace, stopping only for their child Annie Jenkins’s birth. So Jinx’s earliest and happiest memories are of life in the tinker truck, pulling out all the little hand-built drawers one by one, hundreds of drawers, each containing its own nails or bolts or tools; sitting on her mother’s lap before a campfire deep in the woods; feeding hay to the greedy horses, who grabbed it right out of her little hands; and kneeling down to drink from running creeks. Her mother used to laugh a lot in those days and sing endless songs to the tune of Kirvin’s fiddle. Those were the good times, before old Dan died and Grace went lame and a rich widow, one of Kirvin’s favorite customers over the years, up and gave them a place to stay.

  The old white frame house sat deep in the pinewoods at the edge of blackwater swamp. Jinx had her own room with no bed but a mattress on the floor with a velvet crazy quilt flung across it and a sky-blue chest of drawers where she kept the little dolls that her mother crocheted for her, an entire village of little dolls. She cannot remember the kitchen, where no one ever cooked, or the parlor, where no one ever sat.

  What she does remember is her father’s workroom, the shed beside the house where people came to get things repaired, such as engines and threshers and stoves and hand mills and even radios—or the handles of pots and pans, or the blades of knives or saws, or anything that needed sharpening. Her daddy could fix anything. While they waited, men played cards or checkers at the long table he had made of a single board from the big tree that fell out by the icehouse. Or they gossiped and talked or played music with Daddy joining in, for it was always easy to get him to quit working and fiddle a tune. Even as a tiny tot, Jinx learned to sing “Danny Boy” and to dance a jig with the best of them. Liquor was sold from under the floorboard, where it was hidden when certain people were present. The liquor was brought by a black man named Noah Dellinger and his son, Orlando, who became Jinx’s best and only friend, a skinny, solemn boy who could play the banjo like nobody’s business, joining right in with the men.

  By the time she was three or four, Jinx knew to stay out in the workroom and not in the house where her mother spoke often to those who were not there, sometimes obeying their instructions to set off on a little trip with her daughter—hitchhiking into town, say—which Jinx enjoyed—or all the way to Edenton; or moving into an abandoned bread truck out in the woods where there was nothing to eat but blackberries. Jinx stopped going when she grew old enough to resist. Then her mother went off traveling alone, and then she was put into a hospital somewhere up in Virginia. Jinx knew her mother died there, but instead she likes to imagine her still riding on a bus, looking out the window at the passing scenery.

  Kirvin Feeney had girlfriends, nice girlfriends who cooked sometimes, or cleaned up, and gave Jinx clothes and taught her to dance and wear makeup when she was just a little girl, a “little fancy girl” they called her. Everybody got a kick out of her. The only problem was that these women tended to leave pretty quick once they realized they were not going to change her daddy. Though Jinx went to school for a while, she soon stopped trying. It was hard to get there, and it was more fun to hang around the shop with the men anyway. The older she got, the nicer they were.

  Soon she was going off with some of them to do things that were mostly fun anyway and didn’t mean a damn thing to her anyhow. If Kirvin Feeney knew about these things, he never said so, but his health was so bad by then that he had pretty much stopped working, and he must have been glad for the kerosene and coffee and food that she supplied, though finally he wouldn’t eat hardly anything, living on grits and liquor brought around by Orlando Dellinger and his daddy, the only ones of all that crowd who continued to come to the house at the end.

  Jinx was sent to live with her mother’s sister, whom she had never even seen. This was her aunt, Mary Ellen, and her uncle, Royster Biggs, who ran a big hog farm out in the country near Warsaw, North Carolina. The man from the state drove her over there. The highway ran straight as a ruler across the dry red land that lay flat in every direction, laid out in different kinds of fields like some kind of big board game.

  Her aunt and uncle’s two-story brick house sat out in the middle of a yellow field as if it had been dropped there. Out behind the house were the hog barns, long low structures, lots of them, and several big scummy ponds that looked suspicious. “Damn,” the man said. “I can smell it already.” He rolled up his window, which did not help. To the left sat a brick garage that was nearly as large as the house, with space for five vehicles. A gleaming white Cadillac with fins was pulled up in front of the house. The door of the house opened up, and there stood her uncle and aunt, who looked like hogs themselves.

  “Oh, they did not!” I exclaimed at this part of the story, but Jinx swore they did, from their fat pink hands and arms right down to the hairs in his nose and ears and her aunt’s plump cheeks and rosy complexion, the diamond rings she always wore cutting into the flesh of her pudgy fingers.

  “I would have known you anywhere, you poor little thing, you!” Jinx’s aunt Mary Ellen exclaimed, smothering Jinx in a hug, which Jinx hated, she said, even when Aunt Mary Ellen burst into tears and cried, “Oh Royster, she looks just like Catherine!”

  “Well, that don’t sound too good to me,” Uncle Royster said, carrying Jinx’s bag into the house, where all the furniture looked like big dark crouching animals. Up they went, one, two, three flights of stairs to a stifling attic room with a fan in it at least. The bedside table held a Bible, which Aunt Mary Ellen picked up and presented to Jinx. “It is never too late,” she said, her cheeks quivering.

  The Bible turned out to have a bookmark in it, open to the story of the prodigal son. Uncle Royster turned out to be a deacon in the church, as well as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Jinx found the box holding all his regalia in the crawl space at the back of the attic closet, along with several boxes of guns, carefully oiled and shiny.

  They bought her some new clothes in Kinston and made her go to church on Sunday, Sunday night,
and Wednesday. The minister’s son, Troy Merritt, had a big crush on her. They made her go to the consolidated school, too, but the kids made fun of her, how ignorant she was for her age, so soon she was skipping out and playing hooky with some of them, and then they all got caught and her uncle disciplined her by spanking her with a hairbrush on her thighs where no one could see the marks. “This is our duty,” Aunt Mary Ellen told Jinx. They knelt and prayed for her, making her kneel, too.

  Then she ran away with Troy Merritt in his parents’ car, and all hell broke loose. They stayed gone for two days. Jinx was brought back to the farm by the sheriff himself. A sweet old man, he came into the parlor where he stood with his hat in his hands and surprised them by counseling kindness and mercy. “This girl has already been through a lot,” he said. “It’s time for this family to come together and make a new start.” Jinx hated for him to leave. She stood at a dining room window watching him drive off down the driveway, kicking up a plume of dust that grew smaller and smaller.

  Her aunt went, too, out to the grocery store. Uncle Royster made her take off her panties and bend over the sofa while he whipped her with his belt, raising welts on her butt with the buckle which had his initials on it, REB. Her aunt came home and fixed chicken and biscuits, Jinx’s favorite dish, in honor of the brand-new start, the three of them holding hands for the blessing.

  That night Uncle Royster came up to the attic and into her bed, and when she fought him, he said, “Why, you’re one little hellion, you are!” almost approvingly. “But how are you gonna like this?” holding the cold gun against her temple so that she would get down and do what he said. Such things happened many nights afterward, so long as Jinx stayed in that house, but she didn’t care anymore, or fight back, or react in any way, which made him “madder than fire,” she said. She made Fs at school, which Troy Merritt no longer attended, having been sent away to a military academy.

  One day Jinx got off the bus and came in to find her aunt waiting for her, seated on the floral sofa with an even higher color in her cheeks. “Dear,” she said—this is how she had addressed Jinx ever since the new start—“in doing the laundry today, I noticed stains in several pairs of your panties. It looks to me like they are bloodstains, Annie, and I believe it’s time for you to tell me what is going on.”

  “Nothing.” Jinx slung her bookbag onto the marbletop coffee table. “Not a goddamn thing.”

  “Don’t you swear at me, young lady. I am trying to help you. This question is just between you and I, dear. Are you having menstrual problems? Or perhaps, er, relations?”

  Jinx looked her in the eye. “Why, yes I am,” she said. “With your husband, my uncle Royster Earl Biggs. He pulls a gun on me to make me do it.”

  Jinx’s aunt turned bright red, then white, then red again. She stood up and started screaming and pulling at her hair, which came loose from its ugly clamps and clips and stood out all over her head like snakes. “Liar!” she screamed. “Whore!” beating at her own face with a Guidepost magazine.

  “I couldn’t believe she even knew those words!” Jinx told me, gigglng.

  When her aunt stumbled off to lie down, claiming palpitations of the heart, Jinx stuck her few belongings into her pillowcase and grabbed a set of keys to the old green Ford from the secret drawer in the mudroom. For weeks now, she had been practicing on it. She picked up Orlando Dellinger in Greenville two hours later. He wore a maroon felt cap and carried his banjo and a valise that contained, among other things, several bottles of whisky and a .45.

  Dear. Judge. Irven.

  If you think you are doing me a faver to let me out of jail here at Carthage and send me back to Samarcand Manor I want to tell you Dear Judge you are NOT. The Moore County Jail is Heaven in my opinon. I will stay in this Jail a hunnerd years before I go back over there.

  It is True I set my bed on fire, I am not sorry ether, I do not care. I will do it agin in a minit, anything to tare that place down to the ground so No One will ever go there agin. It is not fit for a soul. I have been chased by dogs over there, and bit in the leg, and made to lie down nekid on the dirty floor and beat with Whips until bloody, I have still got the scars on my legs to show for it, and been locked up for days in a filthy room to sleep with rats, and also with a girl that had the dipthery but I did not catch it ha ha. I am STILL ALIVE and I beg you do not send me back over there.

  If you think it is a Reformatery it is NOT they do not reform any one over there but make us mean and sad and turn into Bad girls that do not give a dam, as I was before I landed in this nice jail where Sheruff Tate and his wife treats you good like a real Person and has give me a white Bible for my Own. This Bible is a humdinger with the words of Jesus wrote out in red. I love to read and the Bible above all, I want to be Good above all in fact I will be so good and cook or clean or help out in any way even slops I mean it. Do not send me back over there for the Love of God do not. O please Dear Judge I am a child of God like your own children if you have got any, do NOT send me back over there for the love of God do not, let me stay in the Moore County Jail I will be So Good I sware it.

  SIGNED ANNIE JENKINS FEENEY JINX

  I believed Jinx’s story, told to me over several baskets of popcorn during late nights sitting up before the electric grate at Graystone. And I read the letter she wrote to the judge, because Dr. Schwartz shared it with the staff, including Phoebe Dean. Yet I was never certain that this letter was completely sincere, though it had obviously been effective. For one thing, I never saw that precious white Bible. For another thing, I soon realized that Jinx lied constantly, almost reflexively, and often for no reason at all. She once told Suzy Caldwell that we had taken a bus to the neighboring town of Black Mountain, for instance, when we had not; she told Dr. Schwartz that I was sick when I was not; she told Phoebe Dean that I was mad at her, when I was not, and on and on. I began to wonder if Jinx could even tell the difference between the truth and a fib. I overheard her telling Mr. Pugh that she couldn’t do her homework because she had lost her history book, when I had seen her stick it in the garbage can myself, and later remonstrated with her about it, telling her how expensive textbooks are, to which she made a face, cutting her green eyes away from mine. “I don’t care,” she said.

  This disturbed me, as did some pretty little pearl earrings that tumbled out of her book bag another day. It was hard to tell what Jinx did care about, if anything, other than getting out of Highland. But after all she had been through, who could blame her now for anything she said or did to save herself?

  CHAPTER 10

  “I TOLD YOU SHE’D be back,” Miss Malone remarked one dark afternoon in November as we were cleaning up the Art Room. I was the only group member yet remaining.

  “You mean Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I said. It was not even a question. I stopped picking up my little mosaic tiles to look at her.

  She nodded. “Arriving next week, I’m told. For another rehabilitation and reeducational program”—Miss Malone’s expression told what she thought of this—“plus deep-shock insulin, of course.”

  “I imagine she’ll be in here painting again?” I ventured.

  Miss Malone shook her head, the long gray ponytail swinging. “Not immediately. Not till they’ve got her well under way up there on the top floor. Though it would do her more good than any of that other. Her husband may have stolen her words—and her life, for that matter—but he can’t steal her art. She’s safe here. We’ll see her soon enough, I imagine.”

  I couldn’t wait to tell Dixie.

  THE TWO OF us were headed for lunch on a freezing though sunny morning. I had just had a session at the Beauty Box with Dixie and Brenda Ray, who were still working on my unruly hair, now growing out wispy but curly.

  “Wait. Slow down.” Dixie put her newly manicured hand on my arm.

  Sure enough, a sort of assemblage, with everyone in winter coats, was gathered there before the grand entrance to Highland Hall, and a car driven by Mrs. Morris’s husband was just pulling away from
the curb. I stopped walking, along with Dixie.

  “It’s her,” Dixie whispered in my ear. “Isn’t it? It’s her. She’s back.”

  For now we could see the woman who was being escorted into the building with Dr. Pine on one side of her and Dr. Sledge on the other. Between the two of them she appeared as small and frail as a child, in a long, nondescript gray coat that was clearly too large for her, and a funny brown knit hat that nearly hid her hair, dull and graying now. Mrs. Fitzgerald looked neither left nor right but kept her eyes down, mouth moving all the while, as they passed through the group on the sidewalk and entered the building. The door shut behind them.

  “Oh, my goodness, she looks so old!” Dixie remarked. “She’s only forty-eight—I remember because she was born in 1900—but she could be seventy, I swear! She doesn’t look anything like her pictures.”

  “She’s really sick right now,” I said. “But she looks different all the time anyway, and she’ll look different the next time you see her, too. You’ll see.”

  Except Dixie wouldn’t see her again, I remembered suddenly, biting my lip. For Dixie was going home to stay, at the plantation out from Thomasville, Georgia, if everything went as smoothly during Christmas as was hoped.

  The group was dispersing as Dr. Schwartz came over to hug both of us. “Sad, isn’t it?” she said. “But she’ll be much better soon.”

  Tall, shy Dr. Sledge emerged from the entrance hall, shaking his head but smiling to see us. “Ladies, let’s get some lunch,” he said in that old-fashioned way he had.

  “Hold your horses, now! Just hold your horses!” Suddenly Mrs. Hodges had lumbered in amongst us, out of breath, wearing a huge red hat. “Where’s that Dr. Pine? Where’s he got to? I’ve got an important message for him. From Minnie Sayre herself,” she snorted with emphasis, her breath making puffs in the air as she spoke.