by Cat Winters
“You got proof last night.”
“A ghost?” I asked. “A hallucination? You said yourself I looked doped up.”
“You were convinced last night. You were certain you spoke with your father.”
“It’s daytime now, and—”
“And what?”
I backed away, sliding my hand across splinters in the wall, for my knees weakened. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“You swore that he told you he blamed your stepfather.”
“I need air. I can’t breathe.” I yanked open the door and tripped over the threshold, stumbling into sunlight that made my eyes sting.
Joe grabbed my left elbow from behind. “Think of everything you told me last night. Remember what it felt like to see him. What was he wearing?”
I pulled away, but my legs toppled like Joe’s card house, and my knees slammed against dirt. The air thinned. A crow laughed from the roof of the shed. I knelt in the grasses and covered my face while remembering every small detail of my father’s clothing from the night before—his crimson bow tie, the black derby, the ebony trousers and coat with gleaming glass buttons.
“Swear to God, Joe,” I said. “Swear you’re not lying to me.”
“Hanalee”—one of his knees dropped to the ground beside me—“they threw me in the pen not because of your father, but because they wanted to arrest a boy like me without shaming my father and the town.” He laid a hand on my back, right below my left shoulder, and I flinched at first, but then he spoke in a voice that reached deep into my insecurities. “Help me to set things right,” he said, “and then we’ll free ourselves of this godforsaken place. There’s got to be somewhere better out there.”
His hand felt warm against me, and I closed my eyes behind my fingers. I relaxed my muscles and rolled back my shoulders.
“Your father’s dying words were a request to keep you safe,” he said in a voice just a hair above a whisper, “and I intend to honor his wishes. I’m not the depraved sinner people around here make me out to be. I just want a murderer and a liar to get what he deserves—to pay for what he did to me. What he did to you.”
I opened my eyes to the grasses rippling in a breeze. All around me, the wind whispered and murmured through the trees. A black garter snake slithered through the undergrowth no more than two feet away, and I didn’t even wince. Joe stroked my back, and I arched my spine and leaned into his touch like a Siamese cat.
“I want to test him,” I said.
“How?”
“I’ll tell him a story that mirrors what we think might have happened. Observe his reactions.” I rose to my feet and turned to face Joe, my left arm still slack from the comfort of his hand.
Joe scowled and stood up. “I’m not going to wait around while you tell your stepdaddy a damn bedtime story. Didn’t you hear Laurence? He wants me out of here.”
“I’ve got it.” I straightened my posture. “David’s murder of Uriah, to marry Bathsheba.”
Joe squeezed his hands into fists by his sides. “I’m not going to wait while you read Bible passages, either.”
“I need more proof before I do anything else, Joe. I’ll test him tonight.”
He wrapped his arms around his ribs and glanced at the wind rattling through the trees.
“Just give me tonight,” I said, “and I’ll have my decision by tomorrow. If he fails this test, I’ll believe in that vision of my father. I’ll believe you.” I walked two steps toward him and lowered my voice to ensure no one else would hear. “I’ll help you get revenge.”
CHAPTER 9
SEE WHAT I SEE
MAMA FROWNED AT ME OVER A sheet of rolled-out dough when she caught me stealing in through the back kitchen door. Flour covered her hands and apron and made the air taste dry.
“Where were you?” she asked, setting down the rolling pin. “You had me worried sick when you ran off angry after talking about Joe.”
“Is Deputy Fortaine gone?”
“He left shortly after you ran away. Where were you?”
“Just out for fresh air.” I hustled across the kitchen and toward the main hallway.
“Hanalee,” said Mama, stopping me dead in my tracks. Her tone carried a strange calmness that worried me more than if she had shouted. “I know . . .” She tucked her chin against her chest and cleared her throat. “I know I’ve never told you this, but before you came along, your father and I tried for several years to conceive a baby, without success. We even lost two infants, just a few months into the pregnancies.”
My mouth fell open. “Y-y-you did?”
She brushed flour off her palms and leaned the small of her back against the edge of the wooden countertop. “People around me, even well-meaning ones, hinted there might be something unnatural about your father and me having children together.”
I pressed my lips closed.
“But,” she continued, “instead of listening to prejudice and superstition, I educated myself about conception and birth. In fact, Uncle Clyde himself counseled your father and me on this matter. He even provided me with medical textbooks.”
“I don’t see what any of this—”
“I became well versed in the subject, you see.” She wiped her hands on her apron, leaving behind streaks of white. “Science taught me that sometimes—no matter who might make up the members of a couple—it takes a while for a woman to become in the family way. Other times, it happens the moment a woman first lies with a man.”
“Why are you telling me all of this right now?” I asked.
She walked over to the kitchen table and picked up my sketch pad. “I found this drawing in your room.” She turned the pad toward me and showed me the picture I’d drawn of Joe, standing in an indistinct body of water as high as his hip bones.
I stepped back, fear prickling across my skin.
“It’s Joe Adder, isn’t it?” asked Mama. “Naked.”
My face flushed. “It’s just . . .”
Mama cocked an eyebrow and swung the sketch pad by the tips of her fingers. Flour snowed off her hands and speckled the empty white sky above Joe’s head.
“It’s just an imaginary young man,” I said. “I made him up.”
“He looks an awful lot like the way I remember Joe looking. Aside from the lack of clothing.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Why were you snooping around in my room?”
“Were you with Joe just now?” Mama straightened her neck.
“I . . .” I couldn’t look her in the face. My ears pulsed with a loudening beat.
“Why would you want to spend time with him?” she asked, her voice strained with hurt. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this, Hanalee.”
“It’s not . . .” I pulled at my collar. “You don’t understand.”
“You’re no longer allowed to leave this house on your own.”
“What?” I burst out laughing. “Oh, if you only knew how ridiculous you’re being.”
“Do you hear me?” she asked. “You’ve upset both your father and me by letting that boy whisper his lies into your ear and do God knows what else to you.”
“Joe hasn’t touched me.”
“I want you to go sit in a hot bath.”
I gasped. “Why?”
“Because I believe he has touched you, and I’ve always read that hot baths can impede a pregnancy.”
“I’m not carrying Joe Adder’s baby! That’s the most absurd claim that anyone could—”
“Go!” She pointed to the hallway. “Draw yourself a bath.”
“There’s no reason—”
“You’re staying inside this house from now on. No more journeying outside on your own. No more wandering in the woods. I’ll lock you in your room if I have to.”
“Mama—”
“I won’t keep worrying about you. This will keep you safe.”
“I’m not going to get—”
“Go!”
RELUCTANTLY, I FOLLOWED MAMA’S ORDERS AND
plunked myself down in a scalding-hot bath in our little indoor bathroom, which was tiled in blue and white diamonds. My hair needed a washing, anyway. I leaned my head back in the water, my face sweating in the steam, and I soaked each curl from the roots to the spiraling tips. Then I scrubbed my scalp clean with Canthrox shampoo and dunked my head again.
Beneath the ripples in the water, my body seemed to waver back and forth like a reflection in a curved mirror I once saw at a church carnival. My breasts, my stomach, my navel, the dark triangle of hair between my thighs—all of me—shimmied back and forth, growing and shrinking; all the parts of me that no boy in my community would ever be allowed to see, unless his skin miraculously transformed into a shade of brown or black, or mine turned white. Unless we sinned and enjoyed each other outside the bonds of holy matrimony.
To think Mama believed that I would touch Joe Adder.
Or that Joe Adder would touch me . . .
To chase such thoughts away, I closed my eyes and nudged my mind back to the days when Daddy would take me out to the very pond in which I’d caught Joe bathing. The line between our property and that of the Paulissens blurred around the water, but our families never quarreled, and what was theirs was ours, and vice versa. Daddy would roll up the legs of his pants after hard work in the fields on a hot summer day, and we’d wade in far enough to cool our shins in water that reflected the greens and browns of the trees. My toes sank into the sludge below my feet, and I’d sometimes see crawdads resting on the banks, or the shadows of minnows darting around my legs. Daddy would tell me a story he once learned from a Creole fellow about a man who convinced a wizard to turn a prince into a fish as a punishment for loving his daughter. We’d sing “Wade in the Water,” and Daddy’s voice would rise up, deep and rich, into the boughs hanging over our heads. Sometimes he even sang so low, he sounded like the frogs croaking on springtime nights, and I’d laugh at the sound of it but would also feel filled up and get teary-eyed.
I rested the back of my head on the curved ridge of the bathtub and let myself stay in the pond for a while. Mama clanked her spoon against a bowl in the nearby kitchen, and the washroom walls darkened with shadows. But, for a moment, I stood within that swimming hole, next to my daddy, with the water lapping at my knees and my voice joining his on the wind.
MAMA HAD LAID OUT MY WASHED AND PRESSED BLUE cotton dress—the same dress I’d first worn into the woods to hunt down Joe—with wide pockets and a low waistline. After donning the clean clothing, I sat on the edge of my bed and brushed out the tangles in my hair, which soaked a damp spot across my back, but the curls were too wet to pin into my fake bob just yet. I didn’t know how other brown-skinned girls with tight curls like mine combed and dried their hair, but I always begged my mother to allow me to buy one of the straightening combs I’d seen in the pharmacy. “Don’t try to hide your pretty curls, Hanalee,” she’d say every time I asked, even though she didn’t know what to do with my hair, either. Daddy had never paid enough attention to his mother’s and sister’s grooming habits to pass along any beauty tips from them. He just said their curls were even tighter.
Down below me, between the mattress and the box spring, hid the sketch pad I’d grabbed back from Mama before my bath. And in the drawer of my bedside table, no more than two feet to my right, hid the sheet of newsprint from the night before, alongside the bottle of Necromancer’s Nectar.
I could feel my words—my father’s words—captured in black ink, beyond the table’s wood. I squeaked open the drawer and stared at the phrase I’d scrawled across the paper.
I put full blame on the doc.
The longer I looked at the words, the more the ink seemed to bleed across the pores in the newsprint, growing thicker, blacker, stronger. The letters curled into vines that could strangle a neck—or serpents that could sting a body with a flick of a poisonous tongue and a bite of needle-sharp teeth. I saw my father staggering toward me on the highway in the dark with his busted leg, his eyes illuminated by moonlight.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t a stronger man,” he’d said, “and that hate won out that night.”
I grabbed the bottle and the note and buried them in a box of old toys beneath my bed. A dented cardboard container of bullets also hid in the hiding spot, beneath a canister of Tinkertoys and my Raggedy Ann doll.
A knock came at my bedroom door. I started and shoved the box beneath the center of my bed with a clatter of blocks and bullets.
“Hanalee?” called Mama from behind the door.
“Yes?” I jumped back onto the mattress.
“Fleur came over to see you. Are you dressed?”
“Yes.”
The door opened, and Fleur—lovely Fleur in pink cotton and a satin hair ribbon—slipped into the room with the look of a person encountering a wounded cat with blood matted in its fur. Her sky-blue eyes turned wide and dewy. She carried a small sprig of purple flowers.
“Keep the door open, Hanalee,” said Mama from behind her.
“Why?” I asked.
“You know why. I’m worried about you.” She set her hand on Fleur’s left shoulder. “Stay with her as long as you’d like, Fleur. I think she could use your company right now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll be down in the kitchen.”
“Yes, Mama,” I said.
I sat as still as a member of our church choir, my hands folded in my lap, my posture impeccable, so that Mama would wander away.
Fleur sat down beside me on the bed with the little floral bouquet nestled against the folds of her skirt. The staircase creaked during my mother’s descent.
Once Mama reached the bottom floor, Fleur rested her chin against her right shoulder and looked at me. “How are you?” she asked.
I pushed my hands against the tops of my thighs and bent forward at the waist.
“Are you all right?” She laid her hand on my back, above my left shoulder blade, just as Joe had done in the woods.
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Are you still troubled by what Joe said about your father? Or what I said about”—she hesitated—“your father . . . on the road?”
“Well . . . to be most honest . . . I . . .” I took hold of Fleur’s hand and squeezed it.
“What? What’s happened?”
I swallowed and sat up straight. “I spoke to my father last night.”
Fleur’s hand grew still beneath mine.
Mama ran the sink down in the kitchen; I knew there’d be no chance of her hearing the words I longed to say, so I continued in a whisper. “Don’t ask me how I communicated with him, but he told me he blames Uncle Clyde for his death. He said his body couldn’t take what it was given that Christmas Eve and that hate won out that night.”
Fleur’s fingers tightened around mine, and her eyes watered. “Are you positive you spoke with him? Or did—did you merely dream that you saw him?”
“I swear to God, Fleur, he talked to me. The more I think about the encounter, the more I remember how real it all felt—and what he looked like, standing just a few feet away from me in the moonlight. He said he doesn’t blame Joe. He blames the doctor.”
“Oh,” she said—a small whimper of sound. She knitted her eyebrows and rocked a little. “I don’t . . . Are you certain? Are you sure Joe isn’t just planting wicked ideas in your head and tricking you into believing he’s innocent?”
I slid my hand out of hers. “I don’t think so.”
“Joe seems in an awful hurry to accuse others of faults and crimes, when he was the one driving around blotto.”
“‘Blotto’?”
“That’s what Laurence calls people when they’re drunk.” She gripped the edge of the mattress. “Joe’s brought so much tension into this town over the past few days. It feels like an explosion’s about to blast through the entire community because of him.”
I cast a sidelong glance at her. “How do you mean?”
“Laurence keeps yelling at Mama and me, telling
us to watch our behavior and spend more time with church groups, to mind how we look to the community. Deputy Fortaine and Mama had a spat, and now he’s keeping an eye on Laurence, making sure he’s not bootlegging. And those Wittens and some other boys are over all the time now, whispering about Joe, making accusations.”
I stiffened. “What are the boys saying?”
“They call him”—her ears turned pink, and she hunched her shoulders—“a word I’m not going to say, but I know what it implies because of the shocking things they talk about him doing. They’re planning what they’ll do to him if they find him, and I have to wonder if Laurence is hiding him just to brag that he captured him for everyone. Just to impress them.”
“Oh, Jesus.” I dug my fingernails into the folds of my quilt.
Fleur transferred the sprig of purple flowers into my lap. “Please stay away from Joe. It’s not safe to be around him. He’s got . . . He’s not . . .” She licked her lips. “The other boys say he—”
“I know Joe’s secret, Fleur. I know the types of things those other boys are probably saying about him.” I picked up the flowers by the stems and brushed the ball of my right thumb over the petals, which looked like wide-open mouths about to chomp down on my finger. “What is this for?” I asked.
“It’s alfalfa . . . for luck.” She cupped her hand around my hand and held the flowers along with me. “Please, promise me you’ll keep safe. Don’t go looking for your father’s ghost anymore or hunting around for Joe.”
I sucked in my breath. “Are you safe around those boys, Fleur?”
“Mama’s always there. And Laurence wouldn’t ever let any of them lay a finger on me.”
“You see why I worry about the two of us getting stuck here in Elston? That pack of hungry wolves you’re talking about contains all your eligible picks for a husband.”
Fleur nodded. “I know. Maybe I should just join a convent.”
“No, the Klan is anti-Catholic, remember? They’ll pass out pamphlets and host a baseball game to fund the demolition of your convent.”
Our eyes met, and we both broke into nervous snickers with our heads bent close together.