Out of the Night That Covers Me

by Pat Cunningham Devoto

  He had no idea what she was talking about, but he still persisted. “You and I could leave here. We could leave here and maybe take Shell and . . .” He heard how foolish it sounded.

  “Where would we go—to the mill? What would I do? They only hire men. That’s where we was ’fore he drunk hisself out of that job. To the okra factory? They only hire niggers. They wouldn’t give me the time of day. To another town, with not one speck of money and no kin left in the world since your mother had to up and die on me?”

  She pulled so hard on the next drag of the cigarette that the glow seemed to run halfway up the white paper. Leaning her head back, she let out big puffs of smoke, as if she was going to blow smoke rings, but it came out as big clouds that she looked into as they hung in the musty air. “Hell, I didn’t even finish high school. I was so antsy to—” She stopped and seemed to conjure up pictures out of the smoke. “Before he started drinkin’ heavy, Luther used to be . . .” She reached over to the pile of dishes at the end of the table and jammed the Lucky Strike out in a leftover tomato slice. “Never mind.”

  Then she got up and started scraping dishes again, silent for a long time. When she finished, her mood seemed to brighten. “Well,” she said, pushing her hair out of her eyes and talking in her old voice. “Well, just never you mind. There’s gonna be changes round here. I got me a plan. Just you wait till our stuff comes from your mama.”

  Nelda hadn’t wanted her sister to die, but she had, and now, for Nelda, it was like manna from heaven. All those things, things she had never dreamed of having, were on their way to her. The possibilities were endless: She could keep some; she could sell some. She said out loud, without seeming to think of John, “Heck, I might even sell it all and take a trip to Memphis.” She smiled. “Or somethin’ else you might not even think of.

  “Then we’ll see,” she said. She stacked the last of the dishes in the open sink, waiting for Shell’s water. “Then we’ll see.”

  The Bend

  HIS real mother had not wanted him. She had said as much when she came to Mama Tuway to have the cards read.

  The old woman wanted him from the moment she saw him bundled up in the worn-out blanket his mother had wrapped him in. His face was covered with irregular white patches. At first, she had thought it was a birthmark, but upon further inspection she had seen that his coloring was like this all over. There was a large patch of white around one eye and down the right side of his jaw. The rest of his face was black or a very dark brown, except for his left ear, which was white. Two of the fingers on each hand were white and the rest were dark brown. A large spot in the middle of his stomach and part of one leg were white. Other than that, he was a perfect baby. He had dark, intelligent eyes that followed her when she moved around the room. He was bigger than most babies his age and he looked perfectly healthy. She was fascinated. She loved things that didn’t fit into natural patterns: the tree that grew misshapen, the three-legged cat. To her, such things were far from being freaks of nature; she considered them omens, special gifts to be interpreted by the right person, and, in this case, she knew she was the right person.

  That night as the kerosene lantern cast shadows on the back wall of the cabin, she had known what she would read in the cards even before she took them up.

  She had added reading the cards to all her other skills because people had assumed she could, living alone in the cabin in the swamp with all the herbs growing in pots on her front porch, and the lawn ornaments, whirligigs and such. She had first put them there because she thought they were pretty, and she had been amused when others assumed they were to ward off evil spirits. Some late afternoons, coming back to her cabin from the Bend, she would smile to herself as she walked up the path in the fading light. There was a carved wood statue on an old tree stump and wind chimes hung from branches. Of course she did have a bottle tree to take care of any serious spirits that might be hanging around.

  All these things did give the place a certain feel . . . and she did have a way with medicine. It had been another skill passed down to her from her mother. Her mother had practiced because there was no other place to go for medical help. There were still not many other places to go that her people trusted.

  The girl with the strange baby had heard about Mama Tuway and had walked all the way into the Bend from another county. Mama Tuway suspected that her parents had thrown her out once they had seen the baby.

  She knew from the beginning she would be able to convince the girl. “I see you alone, travelin’ north,” she had said the first night. She had droned on and on in this manner until she could see that the girl was beginning to catch on.

  “I don’t know as how I can handle no child with no two ways ’bout him like this here one,” the girl said.

  After staying with Mama Tuway for three days, she had left the baby with the old woman and headed north to a new life.

  Even though she was in her forties when she got Tuway, people had not been surprised when she showed up with him. They had expected as much of her. They would have been disappointed if she had adopted an ordinary child.

  That had been over thirty years ago, and divine intervention as far as the baby was concerned. Instead of letting him become the freak some people might have thought he was, she had made him into something, someone, to be respected, maybe even feared.

  When he was a small boy, she had begun drumming into him that he was better than everyone else, that he knew more than most, that God had given him special powers. Mama Tuway had never said what these powers were, and she thought he had suspected from the time he was old enough to reason that she was not telling him the truth, but he had tried to live up to her prophecy. She told him that the marks on his face and body meant he was destined to be a leader. He wanted to become what she thought he was.

  Through his childhood, he had come to see that people were afraid of him when they saw him for the first time. He was always big for his age and quite handsome, but people seldom saw that, and he was too shy to give himself another dimension in their eyes. He had never used his unusual size and appearance in a cruel way. Behind the steely-eyed stare, which he employed on occasion, there was nothing to be mad about, no reason to take revenge. The old woman loved him so, and he knew it.

  She had him saying his letters by the time he was able to toddle around the cabin. She had gathered up what books she could find that had been brought by the federal government when they had come to the Bend during the Depression.

  Once there had been a school, a blacksmith shop, a gristmill. All of this had slowly disappeared after the Roosevelt administration ended, but she had taken advantage of everything that was available when they were there. Eventually the government, like James Randolph Kay, had come and gone, leaving the Benders to their own devices, and good riddance all. White people never helped—all the time building things that were not needed or wanted—coming and going at their own pleasure. Now the children played on the ruins of what had been the Kay plantation house and the people held church services in what was once a government-funded community center. She had used the books that were left behind to teach herself and then to teach Tuway. He had been a quick learner, sometimes getting ahead of her.

  By the time he started at the one-room schoolhouse in the Bend, he was well ahead of all the other children. This combination of strange looks and quick intelligence had set him even further apart from others. He had made some friends, but, for the most part, he spent his growing years free to roam the swamp and the Bend alone. No one ever thought of him as you might think of an ordinary person. No one ever thought of speaking to him for any reason other than to ask a favor. No one ever really saw him.

  His mother was fine with this way of life. She liked to be looked upon as special. She had had an earlier life, been married, had known what it was to be ordinary, and now, he thought, she delighted in being unique.

  As he grew older, he spent most of his time working or doing for other people. All of his childhoo
d friends were married and living in the Bend by now or they had moved away. But he, he had not even been with other women except for a few trips to Selma. Except for his mother, he was so alone that he dared not give up any part of himself to thinking about it . . . and had not until the day she came.

  That afternoon, the afternoon he first saw her, she had been sitting in Cal’s car, waiting for Tuway to help her, like he had helped so many others. She had been beat up by someone, maybe once, maybe hundreds of times. He couldn’t tell, and she wasn’t talking. He had brought her to the swamp and left her, but he had never really left her. After that first day, after he had seen her sitting there, she had never left his mind.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE next morning, John made a great show of his aching body as he dressed for work right before first light. It went unnoticed.

  He put on an old pair of Little Luther’s coveralls that Aunt Nelda had cut down to size, one of his own dress shirts with long sleeves, and a big straw hat Aunt Nelda found for him.

  They carried new equipment today, fertilizer that was stored in a small room just behind Little Luther’s bedroom. It was used as storage for sacks of poison and fertilizer and any farm materials that should not be exposed to the weather. All other equipment was leaned up against the house or deposited in a lean-to a few yards away.

  The corresponding room on the other side of the dogtrot served as Uncle Luther and Aunt Nelda’s bedroom. Shell slept in what had been a large closet off the kitchen area. She hung around as Uncle Luther opened the outside door to the fertilizer room. Cloth bags with brightly colored drawings on the outside were stacked against the walls. When the sacks were empty of fertilizer, the drawings could be cut out and sewn up into baby dolls that could be stuffed with cotton right out of the fields. It was an enticement for the Negro farmers, who were mainly employed in making cotton crops. All of the baby dolls had black baby-doll faces.

  “Will you bring me back a sack so I can make a dolly when you finish?” Shell asked.

  “What’s that?” Uncle Luther was hoisting a sack on his shoulder.

  “A sack, when it’s empty, so I can make a baby doll like that there.” She pointed to the drawings on one of the sacks that remained on the floor. “Mama said she would help me.” He grunted as he heaved another sack on his shoulder. “Don’t forget,” she said.

  Uncle Luther pointed to a hand spreader sitting in the corner. John took it up to carry to the field. Little Luther carried one sack of fertilizer, resting repeatedly on the way down to the fields.

  Uncle Luther hauled his two sacks down the rutted road that led to the same cotton field they had worked the first day John had come. By the time they reached the field, Luther’s back was wet with sweat. He dumped the sacks on the ground, motioning for John to bring him the spreader. Then he sat on one of the sacks and began to check the spreader’s various straps and hinges. “Come on over here, Little Luther.” Little Luther dumped his sack and Uncle Luther began strapping the spreader to the boy’s chest.

  “This ain’t gonna work,” Little Luther said, almost to himself.

  Uncle Luther’s only comment was to jerk the straps tighter to hold the spreader in place. Then he reached into his pocket and produced a pocketknife to slice off the top of a sack. He began dumping the fertilizer into the spreader until it was half-full, a weight almost too heavy for the boy.

  “Waste of time,” Little Luther mumbled.

  “What’s that, boy?” Uncle Luther reached down to retrieve the knife he had stuck in the ground.

  Given an opening, Little Luther took it. “It’s a waste of time, Pa. This here cotton’s too little. It’ll never make it to pickin’. We’re out here in the hot for nothin’.”

  Uncle Luther wiped the blade on his overall pants. “We ain’t out here for nothin’. This field’ll make it if it gets a good soakin’ or two.”

  “Besides that, we need a tractor. Everybody uses a tractor.” Little Luther stared out over the field.

  “I’m the one knows ’bout cotton, not you.” He swung Little Luther around and tightened his front shoulder straps. “Now git.”

  Little Luther began to walk forward among the rows of cotton, turning the hand crank on the spreader. Grains of fertilizer shot out as from a small rain cloud, skipping off the leaves of scraggly cotton plants, landing in dried, hoe-cracked earth. Little Luther walked on down, following the rows, covering everything within a six-foot distance of the spreader. Midway on his trip back toward them, he ran out of fertilizer and walked back empty.

  “Can’t you do no more than that?” Luther filled the spreader this time until Little Luther staggered under the load.

  “That’s all I can carry, Pa.” He walked awkwardly out in the field, back arched as a counterbalance, but he managed only a small increase in distance on his next pass.

  Luther leaned on one of the fence posts, watching. John stood at a distance, seeing the sun hit the top of the fertilizer spreader and reflect back up into Little Luther’s apathetic face as he walked, empty of fertilizer, back up to his father.

  “Shit.” Luther spit tobacco juice on the dry ground. “Take it off. I mighta knowed you wasn’t man enough.”

  Little Luther began loosening the straps of the spreader.

  He and John stood watching as Uncle Luther poured fertilizer into the top of the spreader. The first fertilizer sack was empty. Uncle Luther looked down at the sack lying on the ground. There was the outline of the back of a little baby doll on one side of the sack. He flipped the sack over with his foot. The face of the colored baby doll was drawn on the front. Assembly instructions were printed on the side of the sack. Uncle Luther took out his knife and slit through the sack several times, making it useless. “Ain’t havin’ none of mine playin’ with no nigger baby dolls.”

  Then he heaved the spreader’s weight onto his shoulders and began to walk. He made the trip up and back with fertilizer to spare. After three trips, sweat was pouring off his face. “What the hell are you two lookin’ at? Go on back up to the house and get hoes and go to hoein’ that field.” He pointed to the field they were standing in.

  “This ain’t nothin’ but scrub, Pa. This ain’t got ten plants a row.”

  In one motion, Luther let the shoulder straps from the spreader slide off of his arms and took two or three steps toward Little Luther. Practiced at this maneuver, the boy stepped back the same number of steps. “Okay, okay. I’m goin’.”

  His father reached forward and grabbed at his shirt. “What did you say, boy?”

  “Yes, sir, yes, sir, I’m goin’.”

  “That’s better.” His dignity preserved, Luther retrieved his hat, which had fallen in the dust, slapping it on his pants leg to clear the dry Black Belt dirt. He looked up and saw John and hit him hard on the back with his hat. “You, too. Git, and bring me another sack of fertilizer when you come. I’m supposed to use up all the bank brung. Might as well do it in this field.”

  They walked back toward the house. “Do banks bring fertilizer?” John asked. Little Luther seemed not to hear him.

  “I ain’t scared of him when he ain’t been drinkin’,” Little Luther said. John said nothing, still feeling the hot burn of Luther’s hat across his back.

  CHAPTER 15

  THEY hoed all morning and after a quick dinner, brought back more fertilizer sacks. The boys worked all afternoon in a field full of weeds. Sometimes, John was hard put to find the cotton plant he was supposed to be nurturing. They were smaller than the weeds and not as healthy-looking. In the afternoon, when they were at the end of a row on the far side of the field from Uncle Luther, he noticed that Little Luther would sit down and rest. He began to do the same when he saw that Uncle Luther’s back was to them. He unbuttoned his shirtsleeves so that the cuffs would fall down over the top of his hands, saving every possible inch of skin from the sun.

  In the late afternoon, they came together at the fencerow to drink cool water Shell had brought out from the house.
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  “Oh, my baby dolls,” Shell said as she stood looking down at what by now was a pile of empty, ripped fertilizer sacks. “Pa, you promised to save me one.”

  He stopped drinking long enough to look at what she meant. “Shell, you don’t want them nigger babies. I’ll get you a good baby doll when the cotton comes in.”

  “Yes I did. I wanted it.” She knelt down and began to sift through the pile to see if anything was worth saving.

  “No you don’t.” He stepped over and put his foot on the sacks. “If you do, you ain’t none of mine.” He took one last drink and threw the remaining water out of the tin ladle onto the cracked dirt. “You’ll see. It’ll be nigh on twice as big, and it’ll have a china face, too. Now get on back to the house and don’t you be forgettin’ to bring more water directly.”

  Shell stood up out of the dirt, still looking down at the ripped-up baby dolls. Finally, she turned and walked back toward home. She was some distance away when she turned and came back. “Mamma says don’t forget—you promised to get the mail today.”

  “I ain’t got no time to get no mail.” He looked around. “John’ll go. Go on to town and get the mail, John.”

  John looked up from watching a ladybug on a cotton leaf. “How do I do that? I don’t know where town is.” Shell and Little Luther laughed out loud. Uncle Luther smiled and looked at Shell. “If I didn’t know he was a city boy, I’d think he didn’t have the brains God give a crow. Ain’t that right, sister?” Shell tried to smile at her father.

  “It’s where you come in on the train, boy,” he said. “See that road out yonder?” He pointed in the direction of a dirt road off in the distance. “You take that road and walk it ’til you get to a paved road; then you turn right and keep goin’ ’til you come to town. Turn right at the Texaco and keep walkin’ ’til you see the post office. Now that ain’t hard, is it?” He shook his head, grinning at Shell and Little Luther.