by Isla Morley
Havens feels scoured. Expecting to find condemnation in Jubilee’s eyes, he sees only that same attentiveness on which he has come to rely. “It’s not going to matter what Massey says, even if he claims he took the picture himself—though I doubt he’ll push the issue. No one’s going to touch it.”
At last Jubilee speaks. “You’ll lose your job.”
“It won’t be that bad.” It’ll end his career. It may well mean an end to employment of any kind—after all, who will want to hire a cheat? What matters most to him is that this time tomorrow the pictures of Jubilee will be tossed in the trash.
Jubilee is pressing for some other way, and Socall tells her the best thing anyone can do for a guilty man is to give him a chance to work it off. “Let him do this for you.” Grabbing her hat and shotgun, she outlines her plan to get Jubilee home and give Havens a ride to the station. “Best say your goodbyes now while I hitch the wagon.”
How Havens longs to envelop Jubilee, to hold her, to never let her go.
Jubilee moves to the window and Havens stands behind her, noticing how the trauma has cinched her shoulders. He wants to draw his finger along the back of her goose-fleshed arm. He wants to run his hands along her shoulders, under her arms, and down her sides. He wants to kiss each bruise. Between them is a thin layer of heat and even this is a hindrance, even the particles between them are restrictive.
Taking a deep breath, as if she were about to step under a waterfall, she leans back against him.
“Jubilee, I’m so sorry.” He wraps his arms around her, buries his face in her hair.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” she whispers.
They watch as Socall brings the wagon around, and he tightens his hold on her, sways her.
Socall whistles for them to come.
Jubilee looks at Havens’s watch. “You’ve got four hours yet to wait.” She tells him about an abandoned shack behind the graveyard. “I could wait with you.”
“You can’t go out again. You need to stay with your family.”
She turns around to face him. “I need to be with you. Just for a little bit longer.”
“You’ve just—”
She presses her fingers against his mouth. “If we were certain we had years ahead of us, then I could say goodbye now, but what if we have only these next few hours?”
He wants to pledge years, but she says, “Promise me you’ll meet me there.”
Any reasonable man would insist she begin forgetting about him right away, but he has long since stopped being a reasonable man. He is lost in her. Gone. Far, far gone. Though he could deny himself, he can deny her nothing. “I promise.”
JUBILEE
Pa, Jeremiah Wrightley, and Chappy arrive home nearly three hours after Socall and Havens set out for town, and all this time Mama has had one hand on Jubilee and the other on Willow-May, as if a great wind could tear through the house and blow her two daughters away. They all meet in a huddle on the porch steps, Pa looking as though he’s lost his entire crop to pests, and Mama like she is going to have to feed her children scraps of leather. Once Pa gets done holding Jubilee and assessing her and questioning her, she reports that Ronny is likely now inquiring about his real father, which makes Pa even more pale and sick-looking. Mama lets the last of the light go out of her eyes and Pa stares out at the land that has taught him not everything blooms and ripens with ease—hardly anything, in fact.
Jeremiah Wrightley says, “Well, that’s not going to go over too well with Urnamy.”
“Estil will surely deny it and maybe that’ll be enough,” Pa says.
To give her father some hope, Jubilee mentions Havens’s amended plan to undo Mr. Massey’s intentions.
“The worst mistake I made was letting those men in my house.”
Doesn’t he know it’s no small thing to tell the world your lie? “He’s going to lose his livelihood over it, Pa.”
“I don’t ever want to hear you speak of them again,” he commands.
Before the men set off again to search for Levi, Chappy tells her his cousin Edgar has closed his gas station for the day and rounded up friends and kin to scour the hills, reminding her that Edgar was a buffalo soldier in the 92nd Infantry. “Ain’t nobody can hide too long before Edgar’s going to find where,” Chappy says.
Apart from Chappy’s grandmother, Jubilee doesn’t know his other relatives too well. Much like what she and her family have learned to do, much like anyone on the receiving end of hateful treatment would do, they pretty much keep to themselves, and that they are now aiding in the effort to find Levi makes her wonder if the Right-coloreds in town won’t ever really get their way, that Negroes and Blues and whoever else they deem lower won’t “mind their place.”
She, Mama, and Willow-May join Grandma inside. It’s less than an hour till that train comes and Mama is insisting that Jubilee now eat what’s in front of her. After scoffing down a couple of hasty bites, she dashes to the sink with her plate still half full, announcing a quick visit to her aviary to tend to her birds.
“You’re not going anywhere after what’s just happened. You’re staying right where you are.”
“They haven’t been fed for two days, Mama.”
“They can get by.”
But Jubilee grabs her veil and promises to be back in less than an hour. She rushes outside, figuring which route will get her to Havens the quickest. Keeping low, she scurries across Spooklight Meadow and scans all directions before racing across the corner of Jeremiah Wrightley’s land. For a good long way, the bushes and trees offer cover, but she has to contend with the open stretch along the old miner’s road. At a flat-out run, it will take her only ten minutes to get to the turn-off to the graveyard and the next screen of trees, or she can backtrack to the creek and go around Granger’s pond, which will mean she won’t get to the shack in time. She puts on her veil and starts running.
As soon as she hears the engine, she bolts for what used to be the filling station, tears through the back entrance, where the door hangs by cobwebs rather than hinges, and startles a flock of crows whose wings stir the dust into air thick as fleece. She crawls under the jumble of wood that used to be the counter and listens to the vehicle get louder and louder until it seems as though it’ll drive straight through the building. Nothing sounds like dread more than a car skidding to a stop. Go, please go. The driver kills the engine. She strains for voices, for footsteps, any clue of an approach, and after several long minutes, she hears, “Ssh.”
Don’t breathe. Don’t move. How long does it take for dust to settle?
The porch creaks. Footfall with no drag between steps—they are careful to pick up their feet. A pause in front of the broken window. A whisper. Scurrying along the side of the building. Then an unnatural hush.
All at once the back door and front screen door fly open, and boots thunder over to her.
“I guess you Blues just don’t learn, do you?” Ronny tosses aside the lumber and grabs her veil. “Get up!”
Beside him, Faro says, “You coming to town to take us on, like your brother, or to rat on us?”
“That son of a bitch was stupid enough to think he could come to our town and tell everyone I’m the bastard son of Eddie Price.”
“Levi’s not going to do that,” she protests.
“No, he ain’t.” There’s a darkness to Faro’s agreement.
“Where is he?” No amount of begging persuades them to say, so she pleads for her release. “Please let me go. A friend is expecting me.”
“Blues don’t have friends,” says Faro.
Ronny’s frowning face suddenly clears. “Hold up, you mean the newspaper man?” Ronny and Faro trade glances.
“She’s going to have that Northerner print lies about you and your mama in his newspaper,” Faro proclaims.
Denying it does no good. “We can both go to him,” she suggests. “He’ll tell you he isn’t going to print anything about you.”
“Don’t think you can barter
with me! We’re not equal!” Ronny grabs her by her hair, pulls her outside, and forces her up on the bed of a pickup. Tick is behind the wheel, and Jubilee petitions his help, but he doesn’t mind her. What he does do is hit the gas when Ronny yells for him to.
“We got rid of one, and now it’s time to get rid of the other,” Ronny says, as the pickup lurches forward.
“What do you mean? Have you done something to my brother? Have you hurt him?”
Ronny yells at Tick to drive faster.
“Where is Levi? Please tell me!” It has to be a bluff. They’re just trying to scare her. Levi has to be with Sarah someplace.
“Born a coward, lived a coward, and died a coward.” If only Ronny wasn’t so matter-of-fact.
She wants to say, “You’re lying,” but her jaw is locked in place, and a quick freeze takes over her body. She searches his face, then his hands, sees his knuckles are raw and bloodied. Elsewhere are signs of a battle—grazes on his elbows, a rip in his pants, that he favors one side of his ribs with a muddied arm. Her ears fill with the sound of cracking ice. Her eyes become iced-over pools. She can’t picture Levi, not how they say.
The truck has barely come to a stop when Ronny hauls her off the pickup bed onto the gravel. It takes a moment to figure out that she is on the north end of town. Ronny and Faro drag her toward the train tracks, and she can’t understand what they are saying. She can’t feel her feet or her hands.
“Guess that makes you the last of the blue coons,” Faro says, just as the train’s whistle sounds. He is saying something else, but she is now preoccupied with the boots he’s wearing—old and oiled, belonging to someone who knows how to care for leather because there’s no going into town to buy a new pair when no one will sell to a Blue.
It takes all her effort to make herself heard. “Those are my brother’s boots.”
“No, they ain’t,” says Faro.
Ronny pulls a bunch of change out of his pocket. “Next thing, she’s going to accuse us of stealing his money.”
Socall’s money that Levi collected from delivering her shine to the tenant farmers yesterday! Her heart seizes up.
Everyone looks down the track as the train rounds the bend, its wheels squealing, and Faro and Ronny tighten their grip on her arms. The train rushes toward them, its whistle blasting.
“On the count of three!” Ronny says.
She starts bucking as the rumble gets louder. “Tick, please! Help me!” She can’t hear anything now on account of the roar, can’t see anything but Levi lying somewhere, color running out of him. The train’s getting closer, air blasting at them from the tracks, and she wrenches and pulls as the two men start to swing her.
“One—two—”
The train is about upon them—
“Three!”
HAVENS
While Havens waits for Jubilee, he perfects his plan, estimating the time it will take to fetch the damning photographs and get to the offices of Look. It will work. It has to work.
In the musty tumbledown hut beside the cemetery he paces up and down, reassuring himself that she’s on her way, that she’ll arrive any moment, but the more time that passes, the more restless he becomes. He legs it out to the road to see if she is coming and, disappointed, hurries back to the cabin to resume pacing and waiting and worrying. He consults his watch again. Just over half an hour before the train comes. Leave now, and he can make it and be at the magazine’s front door by the end of the following day, or keep his promise to wait for her. He goes outside for another reconnaissance. What’s keeping her? From his position on the slight rise above the town, he can see part of the station. It won’t be long before a whistle will signal the train’s approach. It was for selfish reasons that he agreed to meet her here.
She’s on her way. She’ll be here any minute. But what if she should arrive moments after he leaves—won’t she be disappointed he didn’t keep his promise? She’d asked of him only one thing.
Damn watch! Why does it speed up?
Of course she’s not coming. How could she come? After the night she’s had, she can’t still be awake. She’s collapsed on her bed. The Bufords have insisted she rest. Levi has returned and the family is trying to piece itself together.
She’s not coming, and it’s for none of these reasons—it’s because she’s reconsidered. She doesn’t want to see him again.
He scans the hills one last time, then picks a handful of flowering weeds beside the cabin door and arranges them in the shape of a heart on the floor. Then he bolts.
Every creeper, rock, and bush impedes his race to the station, and in crossing the creek, now full and running fast, he loses his footing. By the time he reaches the platform, he is soaked, muddied, and bone-tired. With the last of his cash, he buys a first-class ticket and is the first to board when the train comes to a stop, and he heads to the front row of the first car, shrugs out of his soggy coat, and slides into the seat beside the window. How he wishes he could have held her one last time, had a final moment, however fleeting, to speak of his heart, to say goodbye. Perhaps it’s better this way.
The conductor stops beside him, punches his ticket, and tells him to change trains in Lexington. “There’s a dining car just for first-class passengers, but there’s usually a card game going on in the one in coach, if you care to socialize.”
Havens can’t imagine being in anyone’s company but hers.
He scrunches up his jacket and wedges it against the window as a pillow, then shuts his eyes. Left behind in Buford’s cellar are all his black-and-whites of her. Those depictions, lovely as they may be, couldn’t ever serve as a substitute for the tangible anyway.
JUBILEE
Together with Ronny and Faro, Jubilee is thrust backward, tumbling to the ground against her captors as Tick launches himself on them.
The train flies by.
Faro keeps her from scuttling into the bushes by grabbing her ankle. “You ain’t getting off that easy!”
Ronny and Tick are arguing over what’s to be done about her now, Tick yelling that she doesn’t need to die. “It’s not right, Ronny!”
“You got a better idea how to get rid of her?”
They squabble out of earshot, and she can’t see why they bother. The pounding in her ears makes her deaf, and nothing about her works the way it should. If it did, feet would stand, legs would walk, eyes would see straight. She gets only as far as her knees. She believes one part of her ordeal has come to an end when Tick helps her upright and speaks with a soft voice, making her promise not to breathe a word of what’s happened to anyone.
“I’ll never tell.”
“Especially not to any newspaperman.”
She must be doing something that satisfies him because he returns to Ronny and Faro, and has them empty out their pockets. Once he’s collected all the coins, Tick crosses the tracks and jumps up on the station platform.
Ronny says, “You got lucky today, Blue.”
Levi is dead and she’s to feel lucky?
When Tick motions to them from across the tracks, they hurry to meet him behind the last car, Ronny limping from some injury. Holding a ticket, Tick says, “Louisville far enough away, Ronny?”
Ronny is saying things and Faro is saying things and all she sees are mouths opening and closing, faces swimming closer and further away until Ronny yanks the veil over her head. He orders Faro to take off his boots and hand over his socks.
“My brother’s boots,” she mumbles.
Ronny shoves the dirty sweaty socks at her. “Put them on, Blue!”
She doesn’t know what he means.
Ronny stuffs her fists into them. Stumps now. She starts to cry and is told to shut up—as if crying’s something she can control—and Tick explains how this is for her own good, that she’s to cooperate, or Ronny won’t be stopped next time. The last few people on the platform are boarding, and she eyes the station’s entrance, desperate for Havens to step through it. This is the train he means to take so why
isn’t he here? Surely, he can’t still be waiting for her. Why did she make him promise to wait?
Ronny keeps her hidden till the last passenger boards, and then drags her to the back steps of the car and shoves her, climbing up behind her, saying he’ll stick her with his knife if she so much as bleats.
It’s Levi’s pocketknife, the one Pa gave him all those years ago. “My brother’s knife.” Seems all she can do for Levi now is name what belongs to him, what belongs to him no more.
Ronny adjusts her veil and pushes her into a seat at the back of the car. Only three other passengers are present, two men tucked behind newspapers and a woman who refuses to look their way. On the platform outside, Faro and Tick are speaking to the stationmaster, who walks right past the train window facing dead ahead and blows his whistle. She keeps scanning for Havens. He’ll come. He’ll rush through those doors and run straight for this car and leap onto the stairs and take her in his arms. He will comfort her and take her by the hand and tell the sheriff about Levi. The train jerks forward. She presses her stumps against the window. Not yet. Give him one more minute. Another jolt, and slowly the train begins to move. She gets up—she can’t stay here.
Ronny shows her the knife, so she begs. “I have to go home. I have to tell my parents. Please. I’ll never bother you again.”
He snorts.
She barters and promises, pulling on his shirt with her stumps.
He hits them away. “Now, listen close. If you come back here, you’ll end up like your brother. If you run your mouth about this to anyone, same deal.”
The train picks up speed, the wheels clack faster and faster. It’s not too late. If Havens arrives now and breaks into a sprint, he can still board. She flinches when the train’s whistle sounds. In a few seconds, they’ll be going fast enough that nothing will catch them.
Ronny shoots out of his seat and staggers to the back of the compartment. She follows him. He opens the door, turns around and shoves her so hard she falls backward. From the aisle floor, she watches him launch himself into the air. She rises, rushes to the doorway, and steadies herself with the rails. Trees and bushes are a blur. Jump, she tells herself—broken, twisted, or dead, it’ll be better than this. The wind whips her veil against her face. She lifts the hem of her dress and bends her knees, and a cold hand clamps around her elbow.