Beulah said that Albert Post visited Sheila every day for the ten years he remained in Houston, though neither Sheila nor Gracie had any recollection. Albert Post was nothing like these city men, Beulah said.
A man is a man, Gracie said.
I see you know everything. One day you’ll learn that fat meat is greasy.
Beulah looked at the two sisters. Yall sap’s runnin.
We jus women, Sheila said. Jus women.
Who asked you? Gracie directed the question to Sheila. She gave Sheila her hardest look.
And runnin early too, Beulah said.
Mind yo own business—still talkin to Sheila.
Who mindin yours?
Don’t worry bout it.
Keep yo hand on it and nothing can get in it, Beulah said.
Never could tell Beulah nothing. She love to weigh, to gravitate, to settle. She jus gab gab gab. Never seen nobody had so much to say about other people’s business. Sniffing the dirt out of they clean clothes. Then gab gab gab.
She shoulda opened her legs mo and her mouth less, Sam said.
Ain’t that the truth, Dave said.
Gracie had tried to tell Beulah about what had happened in church.
She was studying the vibrating words of Reverend Tower’s tongue in the celestial roof. Thinking about the church in Houston that had no ceiling, just rafters for you to look through and see God. Thinking about the Memphis church that was hardly better. Thinking how Reverend Tower, the pearl of all city preachers, insisted his church mirror the pearly gates and roads of heaven. She could only wonder about his old church, but the new Mount Zion had a tower that poked the belly of heaven. Yes. Now she understood the eternal validity of the soul. Then she experienced the oldest feeling in the world. Something clawed her ass. The same something slapped its paw over the harp strings of Reverend Tower’s voice and cut his song in its tracks.
She had scars to prove it, four long red lines that ran from her ass to her nape.
Beulah looked at her, her words not meriting a blink. You been drinkin wit that drunk fool Jack?
She tried to tell Beulah about the child, the alien lodged in her womb, chopping and kicking. The hiss words that snaked up from the pit of her belly. She tried to tell but couldn’t. (By habit, she tells everything twice, once to get the words out, the second time for memory.) She knew what the results would be if she opened her mouth. Less told in the telling. So she drew herself tight, curved her umbilical cord into a noose.
WAS IT ANDREW who rushed her to the hospital the night Cookie was born? Or Sam or Dave driving And’s car? Did Sam have two legs then? She seems to remember freight cars that ran by the stinking stockyards, long hooting locomotives drawn by a single engine.
Her sixteen years, Cookie never spoke a word. Her mouth slack, never giving her grunts the muscle they needed to push clear words. And where Jesus, the lone survivor of her womb, had etched his name on the walls of Gracie’s belly, JESUS WAS HERE—to this day she urinated razor blades—his two dead siblings—who could tell what they were, these still births, the first with rubbery skin, gills, flippers, and snorkel, and the last, a two-headed cat with a pigtail—left no trace of their presence, their names erased chalklike from a blackboard. Though they disappeared, for weeks milk remained, mocking white trails of what she had endured and lost and what she might still endure and lose again.
ONE BABY STOLE A CANDY CANE from Jesus’s Christmas stocking. The toddler clutched it by the throat, beating out its life with his bottle. The toddler grabbed another baby, the loop-bodied one—heads at both ends of the loop—and strangled life out of the throats. For those two quick minutes in her life, Gracie believed that Jesus had come to protect her.
EVENING SUNBEAMS set the dust to dancing. John sat with his arm thrown over the couch, his two brown eyes like setting suns, his body short and squat like Daddy Larry’s smokehouse, perfect masonry, and his careful head sinking into his broad shoulders. A real downtown man. Gracie watched him from the other shore of the room, smelled the bright polish on his shoes. The soul travels quickly from a body touched by sin, she said, repeating Reverend Tower’s words.
Ain’t we all touched? John said.
Get out from among them and quit touchin the unclean thing and I will take you in.
John looked at her. He cut a grin. Took her hand hot into his own. Well, Miss Gracie … He played with her hand, searching each finger of memory.
Maybe he knew, all these children who ran her life, line by line. She still didn’t know why they hadn’t slain her, why each infant seemed to be allowed one feeble attempt at violence before it was snatched back to hell—or wherever it came from—sucked back, spaghettilike into the mouth of its creator. Rising for a single gesture of violence, then the bucket pulled back into the well. Until tomorrow.
Seek ye the kingdom of heaven and all things shall be added to you.
Does that include you, Miss Gracie?
What them two boy-men doin wit them old women?
Don’t look old to me. Least not the pretty one.
But they is old. Pretty can’t hide age. Ugly neither. Them McShan sisters is robbin the cradle.
Perhaps, she said. She extended the banner of religion, the white hand leading through the dark. Will he clutch it and follow? Hope you’re takin care of your soul? she said.
Don’t get down to Thirty-fifth Street that often, John said. His breathing had stilled.
Gracie didn’t crack a smile. Power is no jokin matter.
Little green apples and all that.
You sound like that damn fool Dallas.
Years later, John would beat Dallas until he was blue in the face—first time she would see anybody black go blue, coal change to ocean—for reasons she forgets. Years later, Dallas filled John with the alcohol-flavored notion for the Dynamic Funky Four Corners Garage—John opened it with money he borrowed from Inez, money he never paid back; after a month or two, he dropped the Dynamic; Spider tended the register and books, (Engine) Ernie did all the actual car repairs, while Dallas and John drank and looked on—though John did come up with the clever idea to perch an old black Cadillac on the garage’s roof. But that was later. This was now.
I’m the man walked seven seas. Done drank an ocean of sand. I can change a gray sky blue, but I can’t get next to you.
What do you want from me?
Jus some kindness. Some lovin kindness.
Gracie thought about the passage that had directed her life. Let each of us keep seeking, not his own advantage, but all that of the other person.
For all his crude ways, John carried his giving heart hot in his hand. After his first visit, Gracie saw him as a young man no longer. He began to shine. There was a blinding light inside him, a blinding light that lit from his stomach to his head. Outside the inside light, she could not watch him directly, but she knew the motion of his heart. Whether a skullcapped November night or a bareheaded July evening, John could not get enough of her. He gave her wings to escape the gravity of the church and nest in its rafters. He flung her into the wilderness of sudden discovery and made her a citizen of another world. He filled her life, filled the whole world of feeling for her. She could hear his seed’s approaching call. Bells of jubilation. She heard them peal in her sleep, a distant rhythm. She desperately awaited the night he would rip the veil of her virginity.
She did not wait long. Memory, hope, and reality meshed and clicked.
He massaged her with soft words. Tell me more and then some. Whisper on to Doomsday. And she embraced him, dived into his veins—you go to my head—splashed in the brown ponds of his eyes, her own shut eyes opening the black lens of her imagination. His teeth—he carried a toothbrush and baking soda balled up in tinfoil and white-brushed his teeth six times a day—gripped on to the black whirlpools of her areolae—and hers consumed his flesh—though she resisted its call, closed her hearing skin—because they had gone no further than innocent hugs and wet kisses, though she wanted it and got it, th
eir flesh making loud slapping noises. Yes, he stuck it right inside her, a red-hot poker, and hot blood poured lava-like down her thighs, filling up the room, ready to set the bed aflame and afloat. The next morning, she examined her thighs. Two black streaks on the inside, like burned rubber. The smell of singed flesh. Through nights of muscular love, he forged her a new self. Afterward, she lay on the bed, moon and stars curled between her toes, him hard-breathing beside her.
See yo belly.
I seen it befo.
Don’t be a fool. He the father of yo child. And he ask fo yo hand in marriage.
I don’t care if he ask fo my feet.
But that first time. Eyes flicking with sleep, she woke that morning, nightgown a twisted rope around her waist, to a blood-red sun in white sky, the marriage sheet on display. Them hilly-billies in Decatur hang theirs, Beulah said. Birds sharp as naked blades, flicking light. Yes, dog days summer in mid-June. The sun burning red then yellow then red, alternating waves. At that very moment, she knew, a baby baked in her stomach—she could feel it twist and tumble against the oven walls—while, now, these others were trying to crowd back in. Babies. Pushing their greedy faces in windows, belly-fat faces, these blood-hungry urchins. Babies. Line by line, waiting to snatch her out of the briefcased and Sunday-dressed crowd. Babies. Trying to crowd into her belly where they don’t belong.
Her first day in the city, she saw a beggar in the tunnel between Dearborn and State. He was unlike the other beggars she would come to meet, blind men who yellow-shoved their pencils in your face, musicians who snared you with the cheap strings of a blues guitar, and fresh-tongued men. Sistah, could you spare some lovin? No, he was different. He sat on a mouth-down (water outspilled) metal pail, the stump of his leg pointing like a cigar in her direction, tambourine-rattling his tin can—like those snuff cans down home—and said nothing. She kept her distance in case the brown coins should splatter. Going to work and returning from work each day, she saw him, the metal voice of his can a continual presence for months then years.
One day, he was gone. She boarded the train.
How much they payin you? Sheila asked.
Ten.
Ask for more. I get fifteen, twenty sometimes … Gracie?
Jus stay outa my business.
It black-shoved through the tunnel, shaking, rattling. Then rain clicked against the window. Tap dancing. She turned her face to the window. A baby watched her with a fist-tight face, the train trying to shake him loose, and him holding on with one iron-gripped claw, the other pounding against the glass. The train’s metal voice screamed, Halt!, the steel wheels (so many mouths) slitting the rail’s throat. Dry blood pasted on the glass.
Once, John and Gracie drove down to Decatur to see Beulah. A baby stuck his face bright in the windshield (a cop’s flashlight) and nearly scared the wheel out of John’s hand. The car swerved off the road and into the bushes, branches whipping against the windows and doors, thudding rain. John squeezed all life out of the brakes, squealing. The car—red Eldorado? Cadillac? Park Avenue? Yellow cab? memory refused to speak—rocked to a halt. The world fell silent.
My Lord, John said. Gracie took his head into her arms. My Lord. What was that? Gracie could hold back no longer. She began. Told him all to tell.
THE RED ELDORADO was their private place. Away from the world, squeezed into the back seat. How you like my bed? John said. Theirs except when Dallas, Sam, Dave, and Lucifer (and Spokesman perhaps) invaded, took it over with a steamy blanket of talk.
Man those slopes over there was something else.
Prospectin for gold.
Buildin railroads.
Least they din’t finger none of yall gravy.
Yeah. They didn’t finger none of yall gravy.
The Hairtrigger Boys.
Cause we could shoot the golden hairs from the devil’s head.
Coulda been a sharpshooter myself.
Yeah. We coulda been snipers.
Sniper? Ha! That nigga wasn’t no sniper. Them lifers had him searchin fo gold.
But she knew how to look at John, a certain lowering of the head, and lifting of the eye. And John would shout, Yall niggas beat it! They stole feels and kisses from each other’s body and breath. Her breath rose and fell. At least three times a day, she spread the sails of her thighs for him. She kicked his tongue down from the roof of his mouth and made it learn every crevice of her body, from her nostrils, to her eardrums, from the indention at the back of her neck, to—and only his tongue could speak her secrets.
John screwed with his eyes open, perhaps afraid he’d miss something. She didn’t moan or wiggle around cause that made him come faster. And it might be another moon before he got hard again. Cause I don’t lust you, John said. That’s why it take me so long to get hard again. I want you. But I don’t lust you. Those first years, he always spilled his seed on her belly—that barren desert where nothing unwanted could grow—cause he could afford no chances, taking many already, giving up the well-paying window washer job in downtown Central (the Loop) and setting out on his first business venture, he and Dallas opening John’s Recovery Room. That’s some chump change they payin, he said.
Yeah, Dallas said, some chump change.
I’m gon get me a real piece of money.
ONE SUNDAY AFTER church, John and Lucifer—surely by then they had stopped attending service, had become the service, running missions with Reverend Tower to the dens of sin on Church Street, his bodyguards, Lucifer pulls down the pimps’ gold draws for the hard paddle of the reverend’s Bible, and John heaves them back up—decided to take Gracie and Sheila to visit their parents, Inez and George. The sisters understood the importance of the invitation, for such an invitation precedes proposition. Imagine Gracie’s surprise, Sheila waiting beside her on the trimmed lawn in front of the church and them chatting, small talk about the sermons and the new generation of young devils in Bible class, and John and Lucifer pulling up in the red Eldorado, then the gravity lifting from Sheila’s face, her mouth brightening, and Gracie thinking it was because Sheila felt she had Gracie in a trap, the woman had backslid right into Sheila’s righteous arms, then Sheila opening the back door of the car (Lucifer never was much on manners, chivalry) and getting in, Gracie thinking that Sheila would chaperon her, put her Beulah-like nose where it didn’t belong into Gracie’s dirty business jus because she had made that one mistake when she first came to the city, the Jack mistake, the Cookie mistake, made it cause she was young and naive and country—there’s always someone to point the finger of blame, old folks say; Never let yo right hand know what yo left hand is doing—Gracie thinking this, but seeing different, and finally knowing different, awakened at the sound of their noisy kiss.
Look at them two lovebirds, John said. He motioned to Lucifer and Sheila, brown eyes delighted. Gracie, come on here.
Gracie’s feet wouldn’t move.
Kiss done, Sheila kept her face turned, forward, staring directly out the windshield as if she could steer the car with her gaze alone. Gracie slid onto the front seat beside John. He clicked the engine and aimed the long nose of the car into the street. The car whirred along. Gracie spied on Sheila in the rearview mirror, hoping to catch some indication of emotion. Sheila’s face was expressionless, smooth stone. The entire trip, no one said anything, a curtain of silence falling before each of their faces, a block of silence—cause you felt it—heavy inside the car.
They parked in the shadows of the trees in Morgan Park, and walked over the dusty cobblestones that horse-hooved the sound of their clicking heels. John used his key to enter the house through the patio. George sat bent over the table before the Daily Chronicle—he never read the Defender, the black newspaper; its numerous spelling errors were an embarrassment to intelligent black readers and a boon to white—magnifying glass to eye. He looked up at her, eyes two marvelous globes, red-flecked and weakened by all the places he (and Inez) had traveled. (Travel is seeing, sharpness of notice.) They’d had a good life togethe
r. He was a retired blueprint worker for the Evanston Railroad, who had started out as a railroad dick right after the war. Nothing serious, he said, jus chasing turnstile jumpers, kicking off drunk white men from the suburbs, nothing serious like these cutthroat hoodlums today who slice you open just to see if your blood will run.
Inez sat at the table across from him. Junior, she said.
Gracie didn’t know if the pet name was meant for Lucifer or John.
Mamma, this Sheila.
Mamma, this Gracie.
How yall doin?
Fine.
Just fine, Gracie said.
Glad to meet yall. So these the girls yall been talkin bout?
I heard a lot bout you too, Gracie said. John get his good looks from you.
Inez laughed. Oh, boy. Junior was the blackest baby I ever seen.
How could this be true? Inez and John had the same light tight skin, the same compact physique, though he was wider.
Lucifer came out light then got dark, Inez said, like a yam toasted in the oven, then went light again.
Later, in the privacy of the car:
I like yo Mamma.
Yeah, John said. Mamma. She been a woman all her life.
Rails Under My Back Page 17