by Richard Dry
“Don’t draw me like this, June Bug, with my hair all mussed up.” She pulled her bandanna out from her hip pocket and tied it around her head. She had a slight, shy smile, like a young schoolgirl worrying about the boys getting a look at her, though she was a grown woman who’d been married twice, had two children, worked in a mill all day and came home to work some more; a woman who’d seen a dead man in her daughter’s room. But still she concerned herself with a trifling vanity. Easton turned the page and started a new sketch, just a bust this time, with his mother turned slightly away with that smile.
She placed the dirty pans out on the porch to wash them in the morning and then came back in to finish a prairie-rabbit stew she was fixing, which was just her fancy name for muskrat.
“Corbet let you draw him like that?” she asked, as she washed off cabbage greens and carrots.
“Sure. I’ve done a lot of him.”
“Is that right?”
“Sure.”
“You got some of him with you?”
“Yeah. In this book.” He flipped through the pages to find one he was proud of, one of Corbet with his eyes closed listening to music—one that wouldn’t show him without his foot.
Elise dried her hands on her apron and came over to look. “Mmmmmm. There he is, all right. Sleek as a cat.”
“What you mean sleek?” Easton held the picture up toward her as if she had missed what he was getting at—a calm, peaceful man—but she had turned away and gone back to the sink.
“I mean sly as a fox an handsome as a movie star.”
Easton went back to his sketch of her as she broke off the carrot heads. He worked quickly to catch the wrinkles and curve of her mouth, the slight tilt of her head, and her stare, which, instead of looking nowhere as usual, seemed to look at something pleasant inside herself. They worked in silence for a few minutes, and the chirping crickets filled in the space around them.
“I’m so glad you come to visit me,” she said once again. He looked up and saw something new in her face, not the smile of memory or the gloss of hardness, but a sad smile, one of loneliness. She dried her hands on her apron, came over to him in his seat, and pulled the back of his head to her stomach. “You know I wished you never had to leave.”
He closed his eyes and let himself fall back into her, and everything felt right for a moment. His shoulders dropped and he let his hands hang at his sides as she ran her fingers over his forehead.
“I need you to stay around and take care a me,” she added. With that, something changed inside him, like a small crack in a dam. He didn’t want to notice it, but anger began to seep into him again. He felt like pulling away from her. The smell of onions from her hands became stronger and mixed together with lavender from her apron. He wanted to pull away, as if she didn’t deserve to hold him like this for her comfort. It was she who should be there to comfort him, not the other way around. She seemed to sense him pulling away and let go. She went back to the kitchen and picked up the chopping knife. As soon as she walked away from him, he wished she would come hold him again, and it angered him even more that she didn’t know this without his having to ask.
He went back to sketching the image of her smiling shyly, but he no longer felt a pleasure in doing it.
“When did you meet Papa Samuel?” he asked.
“Jus before de war. Well, no, I guess I knowd him since we was children, but I got to really know him once Corbet was gone to de war.”
“Weren’t you still married?”
“Course we was.” She went to the refrigerator and took out the carcass of the muskrat. She let out a deep breath as she held the animal under the water. “Dere’s a lot you don’t know about, a lot a parent don’t tell a chile, ’cause it’s not good to burden him. I don’t want to burden you wit all dis even now. Why don’t you jus draw an let me fix us supper.”
“I’m not a child anymore, Mama. It’s more a burden not to know.”
She turned off the water and looked at him. “No. I guess you ain’t.”
“So weren’t you still married to Ruby’s papa?”
“Sure. We was married still.” She took the muskrat by the leg, sliced the stomach open, and pulled out the insides. “Corbet never put foot back here long enough to get a divorce. So Sam come around and we got to keepin each other company. Folks sometimes gets lonely. That’s how dey make mistakes.”
Easton shifted in his chair. He couldn’t be sure if she was referring to him as a mistake, but it made one more crack in the dam.
“How come you liked him?” Easton had to say it quickly to get the question out at all. He was no longer drawing, his fist clenched around the charcoal.
“You sure is full of questions tonight,” she said. She opened the oven and checked the bread, then took some radishes out of a paper bag. She washed them and sliced them on the counter.
“Why did you like Papa Samuel, Mama?”
Elise stood straight and thought for a moment.
“Why do anyone like some people sometime? God’s doin, I guess.”
“But why him?”
“I felt he was handsome,” she said. “And I needed someone at de time.”
Easton sat stunned into silence. It seemed so random. He pictured another time, or a hundred times rolled into one, when his mother was in the kitchen, just as she was this day. He pictured her through the rungs in the back of the chair he sat in now—at those times he was on the floor, on his knees, holding on to the chair seat, his pants pulled down as Papa Samuel used a switch on him, on his back and on his head. And through the rungs in the chair, he could see his mother at the counter. She never looked at him.
“Why was Papa so angry all the time?” Easton began to move his charcoal again in his book without realizing it, quick lines back and forth on the page across the picture he’d begun of Elise.
“He wasn’t like dat all de time. Sometime he was a good, kine man.”
“Then how come he beat on me?”
She turned to him. “I don’t know, chile, but I’m awful sorry dat he did.”
He waited for more, but it didn’t come.
“How come you didn’t do nothin about it, then?” His voice was low and tight. He didn’t look at her.
“What you mean, chile?”
“How come you just stood there and let him beat me?” He stared down at his paper, unseeing.
“Well, I didn’t let him, June Bug. He jus did it, and I couldn’t stop him, dat’s all.”
“How come you didn’t make him leave?”
“I was scared, too. I did, jus as soon as I could. I made him go.”
“Ronald made him get out.” Easton looked straight at her. “That was Ronald.”
“Well, I couldn’t do it all myself. You know what kine a man he was.”
Easton closed his sketchbook. His body was shaking too much for him to keep asking questions. He got up, walked across the room slowly with deliberately soft steps, then pushed the front door open, making sure it did not slam behind him. He would not be the one to alert her to his anger.
He stood on the porch looking out over the field and took a deep breath of the cool air, then looked up and blew toward the stars. The insects and animals were everywhere out in the darkness, blindly calling to one another. The stars were bright and clear in the night, millions and millions of them going back into that space until he couldn’t see them anymore, only sense that they were there in the darkness behind the darkness that went on forever. He put himself up into that space, an image of himself floating off into the distance, away from the porch, from Norma, away from the earth, from all people and life. His mother called to him from inside, but he didn’t answer. He purposely made her call to him again.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING they got a call from Ruby. Corbet’s diabetes had worsened. He fell into a seizure while smoking his pipe, drinking bourbon, and listening to the phonograph. Easton took the phone and made Ruby tell him herself. He listened in silence. Ruby h
ad called for an ambulance, but it took a long time to arrive, and by the time they reached the hospital he was dead.
“Okay,” he said, and held the receiver down by his chin.
“Shouldn’t never pick up de telephone early in de mornin,” Elise said. She went back to the kitchen where she was fixing lunch for both of them. He watched her hands slice carrot sticks, the knife pressing into their skins and then snapping down to the board.
“I’ve got to go back,” he said. He could see his own breath in the air.
Elise rolled the carrots in napkins and put them in both lunch bags.
“Didn’t you hear me?”
She put one lunch bag on the table and went to the door. “I’ve got to get to work.”
“I mean,” he said, “I’m going to leave today.”
“All right.” She nodded.
“Just as soon as I pack up.”
“Well, I guess I was lucky to see you as long as I did.”
Easton stood up at the table and faced her, but neither of them moved toward each other. He massaged his forearm where he felt a slight aching.
“You could fly out and see us sometime,” he said.
“You know how I feel ’bout flying.”
He nodded and turned away from her. He picked up his drawing pad and placed it in his box of materials.
“You know how to let yourself out,” she said, “so I’m jus gonna go on.”
Easton nodded again.
“I’m not gonna say good-bye,” she said. “I’ll jus say we gonna see each other real soon.”
He placed a charcoal stick back into its case and heard her feet scuff on the porch floor.
“Mama?” he said. She stopped and turned around, looking at him through the open door.
“What is it?” She waited quietly for him to speak, but he could see the look of impatience in her eyes.
“I came down here to see you,” he said.
“I know you did.” She smiled quickly, then turned and walked down the steps.
He gathered his belongings and left the house as he’d found it, quiet and empty, and walked down the front stairs to his car. He started the engine and let it warm. It hadn’t run in a week. Every day—for every useless day of his entire journey—inside him something cracked a little more. He put the car into gear, turned around on the dirt driveway, and drove back down the road through the tunnel of trees, past the horseshoe and the mailbox and out onto the highway. As he drove, he thought about her eyes, the look on all of their faces—his mother, Papa Samuel, Sandra in the church and the day he tried to make love to her, Charles, the little girl, the cops at Woolcrest’s, Lida when he’d grabbed her hand, and Mrs. Usher. He could see how they all misunderstood; they all looked at him as if he were asking too much from them, as if he were some sort of hungry monster and they couldn’t wait for him to disappear. And he could never explain, he could never convince them that he was anything else, and he could feel the anger move through every sinew of his body.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 1
JULY 1979 • RUBY 41, LIDA 19
LIDA AND MARCUS moved into Ruby’s house in the beginning of June, but for nearly a month, Lida hadn’t left her bed except to go to the bathroom. Mostly, she had been staring at the telephone across the room. Marcus told Ruby that the doctor said she had to stay on her back or else she might lose the baby, so Ruby brought her food and took care of her like she was a little child again.
But the truth of it was that Lida just couldn’t get herself out of bed. When she woke up in the morning, remembering that she was pregnant made her tired again. The idea of getting up, of walking down the stairs and through this house, and having to talk to her mother all made her tired. She felt warm and safe in her bed, so she fell back to sleep. But this morning, she woke up and her hands started to shake in the old, familiar way, as if her body had never forgotten the craving, as if it had always been waiting just under the surface.
She didn’t move at first. She hesitated, in part because she didn’t want to disappoint Ruby any more, or be forced to move out if she was caught. She was also afraid of getting hooked, although she’d always believed she could do it just every once in a while and still be all right. She wasn’t hesitant because of the baby inside her; in fact, the thought of the baby only made her want to take it more. What made her body so heavy, what kept her from going to the telephone, was that she didn’t want to give in to him again, not after she’d finally moved back with the promise of never hearing his name—she couldn’t still be so unhappy; he didn’t still make her hurt that much. It seemed impossible that something from so long ago could control her.
Yet she did want to do it, and she felt ashamed of her own desire, which itself swelled the desire that much more. Her chest now trembled with the need. The more she felt ashamed, the more she shook and didn’t care for anything but to end the shame, to end all the feelings.
“Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit,” she said softly, partially for old times’ sake, but also because it felt right and necessary. She threw off the covers and put her feet over the side of the bed. It took all her energy to get up—the deep bending of her knees, pushing off the bed behind her. Her legs were not accustomed to working with the extra weight they carried. She hated herself even more for putting so much energy into getting a fix when she couldn’t convince herself to get out of bed for anything else. But she continued, as if her thoughts were scratching at an itch far below the surface of her skin.
When she was fully erect, she straightened her long pink shirt over her stomach and thighs and let everything inside her adjust. She looked again at the telephone on the desk. She could walk the other way—the desk wasn’t any farther than the bedroom door—out into the house, down to see her mother, maybe have a productive day helping her sew or clean up. But she had decided already. Just one more time. One more time before the baby came.
She walked to the desk and put her hand on the receiver, as much to steady her body as to make the call. Her arm shook even though she gripped the phone tightly. As she looked at it, she saw that it was not her arm, it was some body part acting independently of her own will. The rest of her body was the same way, growing, breeding, moving, breathing, all against her wishes. And then there was the heroin that it wanted against her will. She didn’t want it: it wanted it. She looked at herself in the mirror above the desk and was overwhelmed with disgust, her face dented from the pillow and chapped, her lips white in the corners. She picked up the receiver and dialed, her swollen fingers barely fitting into the holes. She looked at herself in the mirror as the phone rang, her heart pounding, as if it were Easton himself waiting to pick up on the other end.
DOWNSTAIRS, RUBY WAS finishing up the original for her first new line of clothing. Since Lida had moved in, she had been thinking of making a baby and children’s line. She’d already made a bodysuit, and when she finished putting the tassel on the cap, she would take the outfit up to show Lida.
She hadn’t realized how much she missed sewing, or the feeling of having someone else home while she sewed, and sewing for them. At first she was sad when the Pearsons had let her go, but now she saw it more as a blessing, as His way of telling her to go back to what made her happy and be home to take care of her child and grandchild. It seemed that for the first time in the three and a half years since Love E was killed, she could imagine the future again: the baby playing in her house, money coming in from her clothes, maybe even her mother coming to visit from Norma.
A few hours later she was finished. She cut the thread and tied a knot on the inside of the cap, then turned it right side out. What made her baby line special was the kinte cloth, with orange, black, and green African designs.
She stood and gathered the suit and laid it over her arm for presentation, hiding the cap underneath. She climbed the stairs quietly, knowing Lida would probably be asleep, unless she was still up from when her friend David had stopped by earlier that day. The wood planks creaked, but
not as badly as before, since she’d lost some weight. She could lay the clothes out on the green trunk at the foot of Lida’s bed, like she used to when Lida was in school, so that when she woke up, they would be there to surprise her.
She reached the top of the stairs and stopped to catch her breath. Love E used to say that if she would bring him breakfast in bed every morning, then she would be in great shape to get a man. But Love E’s door was closed for good now.
She turned and walked down the hall past the bathroom to Lida’s room. She turned the doorknob and opened the door gently, but still the hinges creaked. At first when she saw that Lida was not in her bed, she turned around and looked down the hall toward the bathroom again, but she had already seen that no one was in there. Then she heard a soft scraping and saw Lida on the floor, sitting against the closet door, rolling her head slowly from side to side, her naked legs sticking straight out in front of her below her pink shirt.
“What you doin down there, chile? That cold floor ain’t no good for you. You just get back into bed so you don’t hurt nothin inside.” She put the clothes down on the trunk and took Lida by the arm to help her up.
As Lida stood, water ran all down the inside of her leg. She looked at it and shook her head. “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Ruby looked at the puddle on the floor where Lida had been sitting.
“Oh baby, it’s coming now. You got to get to the hospital. We got to call Marcus. Come on with me. We’ll get a cab to drive us. Come on, baby. Don’t be so slow. We got to get you some towels.”
* * *
RUBY STOOD ALONE in the hospital elevator with the warped silver reflections of herself on the walls around her, each a little different depending on the angle. She fixed her hat and pulled on the shoulders of her dress. Soon she would be a grandmother. Or perhaps she already was a grandmother. There was a dignity in that, a sort of achievement to having gotten this far: on her own in California for twenty-one years and she had kept the family line going. And Ronald a grandfather. She looked up toward the elevator numbers and spoke out loud. “Yes, I know you’re with me, but I wish you could be down here to hold your grandchild.”