Sweet Dream Baby

by Sterling Watson

  “Which one, Travis?”

  My Aunt Delia shows me impatient eyes. She wants me to tell her what a boy would do. A boy like Griner.

  I say, “I don’t know. I wish he put it there for you to take.”

  My Aunt Delia’s mouth twists like she just bit into a sour apple. She says, “Wish in one hand and poop in the other and see which piles up faster.”

  It’s funny, and any other time I’d laugh.

  She says, “Do you think anybody saw me take it?”

  I say, “Naw.” I’m pretty sure, too. Nobody passed by on the street. The two ladies who left Tolbert’s turned the other way. Beulah and Caroline were behind me coming out the door. Neither of them has the self-control to see something and not talk about it.

  I say, “What are you gonna do now?”

  She says, “I’m not gonna do anything, Killer. I’m gonna wait and see what he does.”

  I say, “Griner doesn’t talk to anybody you know.” But I’m hoping again, and her hard eyes say she knows it.

  She shakes her head. “Word gets around. Somebody talks to somebody, and he talks to somebody else. Pretty soon the highest is hearing from the lowest through the people in the middle. It happens by little steps.”

  “What does he want?” I ask.

  We look at each other, and I wish I hadn’t said it. We both know what he wants. He wants my Aunt Delia. I remember Griner spying over the book in his hands, watching her dance with Bick. I remember the eyes of a hungry man standing in the rain. It didn’t look like a mean hunger, but what do I know about that? I’m not a man yet, and I’ve only been hungry for a little while.

  And I wish I hadn’t asked the question. I look at my Aunt Delia, and she leans to the cool air coming through the window screen, and she lifts the black hair from her long white neck. Her hand trembles, and I know we’re scared but we’re not gonna show it. It’s like we’ve been told we’re sick. We have to live with this and it’s gonna take a long time to get well.

  • • •

  Lightning strikes close, and I wake up. I’m sweating, even in the cool wind that blows in with the rain. When my head clears of dreams of home, I know there’s a storm. It’s another black howler boiling up out of the Gulf of Mexico sixty miles south. Marvadell told me they’ll come all summer, but some summers are worse. She said, “The Lord be punishing his servant’s iniquity. He be sendin’ the high wind and the hard water and fire from the sky to knock down the bad man’s house. The house built on the soft sand.”

  I asked her if she meant our house. Grandpa Hollister’s house. She just looked at me and smiled and started singing one of her over Jordan songs, “Deep River.”

  I get up and close the windows so the rain won’t come in and then lie down again in the still, close air. I could go to my Aunt Delia’s room. She might be crying. I know she might need me, but I’m scared. I’m not scared of the storm. I’m scared of what we might do now. I’m scared, but I want to know what the next thing is, the next thing we might do. It’s that way with knowing. You can’t stop once you start, and I guess you start the second your eyes open in your mom’s arms in a hospital bed. Maybe you start before that, lying under her heart in the cradle of her bone, in the warm bath of her blood. The preachers don’t say it, and no book I’ve read yet tells me, but I know curiosity is heaven and hell.

  I lie in the dark with the storm blowing and shoving the trees around outside, and I can’t decide. I can’t make myself get up and go. Then I hear a soft sound, and I turn and see the white shape of my Aunt Delia’s nightgown at my bedroom door. She stops there and watches my bed. I could pretend I’m asleep, but I don’t. I move over to the window. I throw back the covers for her. She crosses to me, moving the still air and bringing me the smell of her hair and her skin. She lies down beside me with her back to the door, and I turn to the window, and she pulls me to her chest. She reaches around me and puts her hand on my arm. We lie that way for a while, and then I reach back and feel the tears on her cheeks.

  She kisses my fingers and moves her face down to my ear, and I turn my head to her mouth. She whispers, “Listen, and I’ll tell the rest of it.”

  Her voice is breaking a little, and I can tell she’s pulling the words up from a long way deep, from the deepest secret place. I press my ear against her mouth. I whisper, “Okay.”

  She whispers, “Because I have to tell somebody, and it has to be somebody I trust, somebody who knows me, and now you’re the only one.” She stops, and her breathing goes quick and ragged, and she whispers, “But you don’t have to, Killer. You don’t have to listen. I’ll go if you want me to.”

  I move my ear against her mouth. I whisper, “I want to.”

  So we lie that way, our heads together, her mouth to my ear, and she tells me.

  “Remember what Quig Knowles said about me and Morgan Conway?”

  I nod. Her whisper makes the hair behind my ear buzz, and the gold cross around her neck pricks me. When I nod, she squeezes my arm with her hand.

  She says, “And I told you Susannah Cohen helped me?”

  I nod. The storm outside is rising. The lightning is coming closer. When it hits earth, the sudden light shows me the window and the trees lashing and heaving.

  My Aunt Delia says, “And I told you something happened, and I couldn’t ever write or talk to Morgan again?”

  I nod.

  She says, “Remember what we said about secrets?”

  I remember. When you tell someone a secret, you earn a promise from them. Secrets are worth something. I nod again. I don’t want to talk. I just want to lie here and listen in the warm of her body with this window between us and the storm.

  She says, “I never felt anything like it before, Killer. I’ve read about drug addicts and how they crave the drug or they’ll die. That’s the way I felt about Morgan, and that’s the way he said he felt about me. We met one night when a bunch of us girls snuck out, and some boys did, too. They were all senate pages. One of the boys had some whiskey, and we passed it around, and I ended up in the corner of a cloak room with Morgan. It was dark, and there was a lot of whispering and giggling, and then it got quiet, and we knew what the people around us were doing, and then he kissed me. From the first taste of his mouth, I knew I had to have him. I had to have him always.”

  She pulls her mouth back from my ear and buries her face in the back of my neck, and the gold cross sticks me hard. Lightning touches earth somewhere out on the edge of town near the river, and across the street a limb breaks and I hear it fall with a crack and a thump. Rain runs hard in the gutters along the roof like the blood of this old house, pumping hard as it fights the storm.

  My Aunt Delia trembles and puts her mouth back to my ear and says, “After that, we snuck out alone, just the two of us. We had to find places, and it wasn’t easy. We spent a night in a trailer full of old newspapers that had been collected for a paper mill. We spent a night in a senator’s office after Morgan crawled in through the transom and unlocked the door for me. And we didn’t just kiss, Killer. We did the things men and women do, and finally, we did what I showed you in the river.”

  I nod. I think of my Aunt Delia and me in the river. What she showed me and how it felt, and how it feels now to know. I can’t help hating that she learned it first with him. I want to turn and say I hate it, but I know I can’t. It happened before she knew me. I’d erase him from her mind if I could, but you can’t do that. Part of knowing is knowing that, and it’s part of hell, not heaven.

  She says, “We were only together two weeks, but it was our story, and it had to have the right ending, and we both knew it, and the ending came one night in the senator’s office when we did what I showed you in the river. We made love, and it was my first time and his, too, and I loved him more than anything in the world that night, and the next day we had to say good-bye.

  “We’d planned to
meet, but at the last minute Morgan learned his parents were in town. It was a surprise for him. They’d come to take him home with them on the train. He couldn’t get a message to me about leaving early, so I went to the place where we’d agreed to meet and say good-bye, and I waited, and he didn’t come. At the last minute, he’d left a note for me with another boy. The note said he’d write, and it gave his address.

  “I came home to Widow Rock, and we wrote to each other for a while. We wrote promises and told secrets, and planned to meet again, and then the thing happened.” My Aunt Delia squeezes my arm tight and digs her nails into me so hard I think I’ll bleed. She presses her mouth hard to my ear and says, “I learned I had a baby inside me. Morgan and me had made a baby.

  “I wrote to him and told him. I asked him to tell me what to do. I don’t know what I wanted, but I wanted him to do something. More than anything, I wanted him to say he loved me. I kept writing, but I never heard from him again. I didn’t know what to do then, and that’s when Susannah helped me.

  “I don’t know why we talked the first time. I didn’t really know her. We’d passed on the street and said hey and talked about how hot it was and when fall would finally come. But one day I was in Tolbert’s, and she was, too, and we both had books with us. I was reading something dumb by Frances Keyes, and she saw it and came over to my booth and sat down, and we talked about reading for a while, and then she got this really impatient look on her face and said, ‘Delia, by all accounts you’re an intelligent girl. Why don’t you read something a little more serious?’ And she showed me her book. It was a novel by Edna Ferber. I took it from her and read a few lines, just wherever the book fell open. And I could see it was different from anything I’d read before. And then I looked up at her, and I just started crying. I didn’t know why. I still don’t know exactly why. I must have seen something in her eyes. Maybe I saw that she wasn’t from here. That she just wasn’t from Widow Rock, and she’d understand I was a stranger, too.

  “When she saw me crying, she got this very severe look on her face and stood up. I thought she was angry with me. I thought she was about to leave. But she said, ‘Come on, Delia. Take a walk with me. We have to talk.’

  “I told her everything, Killer. All about Morgan and the baby and when I finished, the first thing she said to me was, ‘Well, you’ve got to stop writing him. That’s the first thing you’ve got to do. It’s clear he doesn’t care, and the more you write, the more you put yourself in his hands.’

  “I didn’t know what she meant. I still wasn’t sure until Quig Knowles came to town. Even after Morgan cut himself off from me, I didn’t believe he’d talk about me.

  “Susannah told me there were just two things I could do, and that she could help me with only one of them. The first was tell my parents and let them do with me and the baby what they wanted to do. The other was go with her to a friend in Jacksonville. She said this friend could take care of me.

  “I didn’t think about it very much then. I was so confused. I agreed to go with her. One Saturday afternoon, I told Mama and Daddy I was going to Panama City, and I drove out of town and met Susannah, and we hid my car and drove to Jacksonville in hers. All the way we talked about books and reading, and she told me about a woman named Margaret Sanger who was a pioneer in women’s rights. She said Margaret Sanger was a saint to modern women. I listened, but I don’t know how much I heard. It was more important to me then that I was with Susannah and that she liked me and believed I could do what I wanted, not what my parents wanted me to do.

  “In Jacksonville, she took me to the home of her friend. He was a doctor who had known her husband in medical school. I can’t tell you his name because he never told me. He talked to me for a while, then he left me alone and talked to Susannah. I sat with a door between me and them and listened to them raise their voices. I don’t know what they argued about. I thought about what the doctor had told me. There were risks. They were not all physical. I would worry about what we were going to do. It would plague my mind. He asked me several times if I was sure. All I could think then was that I had to get Morgan Conway out of me. I had to lose the part of me that was him, that had trusted him. And I could never tell my parents. They’d never understand. They’d think it was about them, not about me. They’d think about Widow Rock and what I had done to their place.

  “So I said yes, and the man took me to his office. It was empty, and we went in the back way. He did things to me while Susannah held my hand. He gave me a drug to take my mind away, and I didn’t think of anything until I was halfway back to Widow Rock and the pain started. Susannah gave me some pills she’d taken from the storeroom at her husband’s office, and told me what would happen next, and how I’d feel, and told me what was normal and what was not. And I got in my car where we had hidden it, and I drove the rest of the way back to Widow Rock and told my parents I’d had a fine time in Panama City. I told them the water was lovely, and the gulls were gray and white with pink beaks, and they swung on the wind, and dove down and took french fries from my hand while I walked on the beach. Then I went up to my room and slept for two days.

  “When Mama came to my room worried, I told her I was just very tired. When the sheets were stained, I washed them in the bathroom sink and dried them with a towel. And I got better, and nobody ever knew…”

  Behind me, she shudders. She squeezes my arm hard again, and digs her nails in. Her voice comes back smaller, colder, and it sounds strange like a voice from a radio playing in another room. “…But, Killer, when it storms, I can’t help it. I’m afraid. I cry for someone lost.

  “I asked Susannah about it the day we went to see her. The day she sent you to the kitchen for cookies. She told me there was a storm while I was lying on the doctor’s table in Jacksonville. She said it was violent, and water flew straight against the windows, and the lights went out for a few minutes, and the doctor couldn’t use his instruments. She said I didn’t notice it. I was asleep and smiling through the whole thing. She didn’t see how I could know there was a storm.”

  She pulls her lips back from my ear, and I can feel her breathing change, and I know that a cold, tired spirit has come out of her, and I know it’s the spirit of her trouble. I know she’ll be better, because now the spirit is mine, too. She’s told me, and she’s better now. But I have to ask one more question.

  I say, “It’s Morgan Conway you cry for? He’s the one lost?”

  She says, “No, Killer, it’s not him. When the storms come, I cry for my baby. I know he’s out there somewhere on the storm. He’s flying the wind and fighting the rain, and he’s trying to get back to me, and he can’t find the way, and I can’t find the words to call him home to me.”

  “It’s only a dream,” I say, and I feel her sigh against my neck. It’s a stupid thing I said, but I don’t know how to help. The storm is climbing the highest place. The wind screams like mad dogs, and the rain pounds the window like fists that rattle the panes in their moldings. I look out at the black, the wet, the confusion of the trees, and I wish I knew the secret words to call a baby home.

  And I remember what my mother said when she knew I would fly south to my father’s family. “You’ll fly on the wind like the spirits of my ancestors.” I wonder if my mother’s pain comes because she can’t call her people home to rest. Because they’re lost out there on the wind. I can’t think of the words to bring my Aunt Delia’s baby home, so I reach back and put my hand on her face, and I draw her tears down her cheeks and hold them in my hand.

  Thirty

  The next day it’s hot, and the ground steams from the rain, and the sun burns water from the street in shimmering waves. My Aunt Delia sleeps late. I go to her room and look at her. She’s lying with her face to the window, and her arm over her eyes. The radio is playing soft the way she likes it late at night.

  I go downstairs for breakfast. Grandma and Grandpa Hollister are already eating. They look angry
. Marvadell brings my eggs, and she looks angry, too. Grandpa tells me he’s tired of me coming down late for breakfast. Why can’t I get up on time and not put the household into such an uproar? He says I’m starting to act just like Delia, like a teenager. Grandma puts her fork down hard and tells him not to be so harsh with me. I’m just a boy, she says, and I deserve a little rest and some fun in the summer. I’ll be leaving soon. I’ll be going back to school. Marvadell lets the kitchen door swing shut, and we hear, “Humph!”

  Grandpa wipes his mouth with his napkin. He looks at me and then mops his forehead with it, too. I know Grandma doesn’t like that. She thinks he’s crude and not as good as the men in her family. I know he thinks the men in her family are all drunkards and wasters even if they went to Vanderbilt University. Grandpa Hollister’s eyes tell me he’s thinking about me leaving soon. He throws his napkin in his plate and goes to the hall secretary. He unlocks it, takes out his sheriff things, and leaves by the front door.

  Grandma comes around and stands behind me. She puts her hands on my shoulders and leans down and says, “I’m sorry, Travis. We shouldn’t have scenes at breakfast. It gets the day off to a sad start. It’s the heat. And we’ve had so many storms this summer. Don’t worry about it.”

  All I can say is, “Yes, ma’am. I won’t worry.”

  But the day is already started wrong. Outside, the steam rising from the ground makes me feel like I’m swimming in hot water. I go to the backyard and shoo the birds and eat some grapes. They’re sweet and ripe. Eddie, Marvadell’s son, comes out of the woods at the back of our lot. He sees me and stops his strutting walk. He stands there watching me in his purple pants and pointy black shoes. He smiles and puts his hand in his pocket, feeling his push-button knife.