Sun shattered in flakes against the windshield. The reverend’s mouth moved but she missed the words.
He was handsome, yes oh so handsome—but she found it hard to hear what he was saying. The sediment of the past floated to the top of her still memory. Memories thicker than a snowstorm, free-floating in the reverend’s car, a single, contained space, a Christmas paperweight. His mouth moved again.
What was that?
I said why don’t we drive to Memphis? Take your mind off things.
No. I really would like to. I really would. You are so sweet. But I better stay close to the house. In case they need me. You understand.
Of course. As it should be.
Reverend Blunt opened his door and exited the car, rocking it with his strength. He came around the front of the car slowly, giving her ample opportunity to observe him, take him all in and appreciate. He opened her door, took her hand, and helped her out of the car.
Well, he said, it has been a pleasure.
The same.
He held her hand, his eyes watching and holding. She read his heart in his handclasp. Well, I better be going.
Yes, he said. That is the proper thing to do. He kissed her hand. Under different circumstances we might have—
Yes.
He pulled her closer. She leaned and took his kiss as if it were her rightful due. Kissed him until the pleasure began to send her.
She turned to the house and made it to the front porch when he called her.
Oh, Porsha. Let me give you this. He crossed the small bridge over the grass-covered drainage ditch and waited for her on the road side of the chain-link fence. She walked to the fence slowly but without hesitation.
I’ll be in the city in a few weeks for a mortuary convention. This is where I’ll be staying. He extended a business card.
She took it and read it carefully. She turned for the house. Walked on in the fresh sunlight.
SOMEBODY TOLD YOU WRONG, Beulah said. I ain’t never been po. Daddy always said, When you needy, eat the skin of a cow.
Porsha wondered if he meant this literally.
Yeah, Sam was a devil alright. But Mamma and Daddy couldn lay a hand on him. Our animals fight them. Our pigs and cows wouldn let Mamma and Daddy lay a hand on nwine one of us kids. Beulah’s lungs wheezed above her words.
How you feel today, Beulah?
I had everything. Cancer. Stroke. Heart attack. Hypertension. Asthma. Diabetes. Arthritis. I feel as good as I should feel. What else is left? I’m too old to get the clap.
Porsha did her best to laugh. She had it in her somewhere. She wanted to laugh with Beulah, for her. Lil Judy, Jacky, and Rochelle had stayed in Fulton where grave and gravity conspire. Had promised to come up in a day or two to bring Beulah back to St. Paul—and her nursing home bed—where all four lived. Beulah had bought them all plane tickets. In her Decatur house, she had raised the three girls as her own. Their mamma, Jesse, just thirteen when she had Rochelle, thirteen with the chaotic brain of a five-year-old, a parentless drinking fool, made worse when a stroke shriveled up the left side of her body, threw her red eyes out of balance (one up, the other down, like losing cherries in a slot machine), shortly after the birth of her last child, Lil Judy. And their father, Dave, Beulah’s nephew, Big Judy’s son, ran the street with his uncle, Beulah’s younger and only brother Sam, two stray dogs. So she had raised them as her own.
How come Beulah never had any kids?
I don’t know. Maybe she already had enough to handle.
You ain’t married yet?
I’m looking. I’m trying.
Well, take yo time. Don’t be in no hurry. Soon as they get some pubic hair, folks figure they old enough to marry.
46
NO. LULA MAE AIN’T HAVE NO MONEY, and I aint’s have none either. So we was gon ask Mr. Harrison to ship him. Never did. He had done enough.
Hatch thought about it. And he would do that?
Yes.
Why?
Kind.
What?
Kind. He kind. That was the best white man that ever lived.
I wouldn’t go that far.
I would.
Hatch examined his shoes. Patterns there. So how was he gon ship him? Plane?
Train.
Train? All the way from California?
Beulah said nothing.
Hatch seethed, sunk, settled, let his mind clear. And you worked for him in Memphis?
Yes. He was good to work for.
Cleaning up after them is good?
Better than a lot of jobs.
When you’d come to Memphis?
During the war. Bought a ticket long as my right arm and hopped that locomotive. That locomotive pack. No room for nobody. No seats.
The smell of everybody’s life mixed together.
So we ride wit the soldiers, sittin on our luggage in the aisles.
And you came to Memphis?
Colored folks bouncing babies to sleep on they knee. Some even draggin long the family hog. Huff and puff up the rise. Two points make a line and we gone ride em all. Where the Southern crosses the Dog.
Her voice thin as the sheet that covers her. And is talkin. Andrew, her husband, the railroad man. Railroad talk. The beat in between the beat of her voice. His cigar puffing up the rise. Lil nigga, that the rail and that the tie and that the sleeper and that the rail chair. Come heah, lil nigga, so I can show you this.
Oh, my soul got happy when I come out of the wilderness.
You went to Memphis? He said it louder this time.
Yes. Sam and Dave got jobs in the meat factory. I found me some day work.
Yeah. Cleanin these white folks’ houses. But why did you come? She was the right person to ask. Her memory clean and clear. I want to tell you and keep you told.
Same reason we all came. The big river flowed from there to here, and they built the railroad right next to it.
The rails are two rivers. Two watery trails.
First came to the city—Lord, I’m traveling. Lord, I got on my traveling shoes—in the middle of winter. That cold liked to kill me. Cold city winds. Snatch off yo durn draws.
There was these two right evil hoodlums laid for me every Friday payday. Two cutthroats wit stockings on they face, lookin like onions. They knock me down in the snow and kick me til I rolled. Grab my pocketbook. And laughin. They yell, Stop thief! Somebody call the police! But this one Friday, I was ready for em. Put a straight razor in my bosom. I cut them every which way but loose. Shoulda seen the blood running away from they evil bodies. Glad to be free.
I WOKE UP THIS MORNING with my mind still on the Lord. You read your Bible?
Sometimes. He lied. He didn’t want to hear nothing bout no Bible.
Those words ain’t written in ink and paper. You go to church?
Sometimes.
Don’t you know? Church is life and fire insurance.
Beulah had walked hand in hand with death most of her life. Beulah will outlive us all, Sheila said.
Turn on the game. Yankees playin today. Beulah never missed the Yankees.
You ever see them play?
Course I seen them play.
I mean did you ever go there to see them play? New York? The Bronx?
No. I’m gon wait for you to buy me some tickets.
He found no humor in her statement. Lula Mae was gone, lost, forever silent, and Beulah was alive, pillows propped up behind her in Lula Mae’s bed—the creaking pain of old age—the windows shut, the shades drawn. Here before him now. She would soon return to St. Paul, resume her life there. He had little time. But why not? You rambled?
First Houston, then Memphis, then the city, then Decatur, then Fulton, then St. Paul. No grass grew under her feet.
Yes, I rambled. The hand of the Lord was upon me. I’ve never been to the seminary, but I’ve been to Calvary. I’ve had no education, but moved the Red Sea.
DROUGHT SUMMER, the topsoil gray and loose, light. Cracks wide, thirsty
mouths, the desperation of breathing. Bent cane stalks like old men. No greening rains. Once, the plowed fields were like quilts in shades of green and brown. Now, a haze of thirsty yellow. He had to see the house, Beulah some other place now. Beulah’s house, down the hill past the weed-choked cemetery, the crooked stones, past the train depot, the train shrieking through the intersection of road and track, speed eased or stopped with a red flag. He found a pile of ash-blackened boards where her house once stood, the hollow brick frame trying to swallow up the sky.
Uncle John always drove them to Beulah’s during winter. Speeding out the city to cut gray slush paths through white winter space and silence. White flakes drop to the earth, fleeing the sun (just as black ashes rise to the sun’s warmth). Square upon square of cornfield, the state hospital surrounded by corn, the crazies made crazier by the constant green beyond the window bars. These plains an hour outside the city, plains fitted for sweeping and rolling winds, twisting arrows that stick everything in their path and carry them off to the farthest horizon. Now the town itself. Decatur. Kankakee County. Snow brilliant white like a second skin on trees, rooftops, awnings, window ledges. The cement path to her house, winter-covered, sunlight blinding on white snow-thickened grass. The mound behind the house, the mound that you could enter through two wooden doors, pull them up and back, raised insect wings, and walk down four or five crumbling stone steps, descend into the earth itself. Cept it wasn’t earth, but a concrete cave filled with dark cluttered junk.
You and Jesus square off against Jacky and Lil Judy. Scratch each other’s eyes in a tumbling-down clinch.
Don’t yall play so rough, Porsha says. They girls.
Ain’t nobody playin.
And the two-story house itself where Beulah had raised Rochelle, Jacky, and Lil Judy, Dave’s three girls—Dave, that nigga, God durn his soul; he spend his check before he make it home; and Jesse would jus grin, Mr. Dave, you so crazy; what she know; she weren’t but thirteen and green as a grasshopper; Dave feed them babies sugar water; Jesse ask the neighbors fo some bread and crackas, then that firewater take a holt to her and she have that stroke, and Sam and Dave, God durn they souls, Sam and Dave runnin the streets actin the biggest fool; Dave spend his check befo he make it home; them babies white as ghosts from all that sugar, sugar sticking to they diapers; and Lil Judy sucking on Sam’s wood stump leg like it some kinda pacifier; sure I took them, raised them; what else was I gon do?—who were quicker than Beulah’s old apron strings.
Don’t get too close to them, Porsha said.
They got worms again?
Yeah.
How they get em?
From eatin all that candy.
Worms live in candy?
No, in sugar.
Thanks and praises. Pregnant and grown, Rochelle, Jacky, and Lil Judy packed up babies and belongings, journey west, to St. Paul—to get the maximum government check from public aid—and left Beulah in an empty house. Beulah musta gotten lonely. That’s why she sold the house and moved with Koot in Fulton; but Koot died; she moved up the road with Big Judy; Big Judy died; where could she turn? Lula Mae? She and Lula Mae didn’t get along. Never had. So she moved to St. Paul, where Rochelle, Jacky, and Lil Judy passed her from house to house, passed her around like a hot reefer joint.
The sweet smell of her asthma cigarettes floated through the room and refused to leave. Brown and green medicine bottles, still on the surface of the nightstand next to her bed. Bedridden—When you old and sick and gotta stay in bed, ain’t much else you can do—in the silk Chinese robe that Andrew, her first husband—two husbands, was this a family tradition?—had brought her from Seattle, splotched with black-lined ginkgos, gold dragons, jade rivers, and scarlet flowers. The smooth tan skin, the neck a hill of wrinkles sliding down to her big-boned torso. The years had preserved her hair—good hair, Sheila called it—flowing in a silver wave down her back. Used to be longer than that. All the way down to her knees. She would brush it in long, slow, attentive strokes as if to bring the words out.
Dave say you had really long hair back then.
Yes, down to my ankles.
Bird wings.
I had to cut it when I started to work in the factory. Your hair get caught in one of those machines.
Couldn’t you just wear a cap?
All that hair?
Late in life (at age forty? forty-one?), she had met And in Houston and married him soon after. They came to the city together. When the gettin was good, she found a job in the war (car?) factory, while the draft shipped And overseas. He speak Japanese, Dave said. Shit, I know a word or two but that nigga sound like he born a Chink. War done, he found work as a Pullman porter. The marriage lasted five years. But the divorce (separation?) didn’t end them. And drifted into town like smoke. Aw, girl, what you doing up in that bed? Every time I come to see you, you up in that bed. How I’m gon look at yo butt?
Gon way from me, mister.
Clicked open a gold initialed (AA) cigarette lighter and lit a sweet-smellin cigar, squirting smoke out of his hair-filled nostrils. (Did the hair filter the smoke?) Silk monogrammed (AA) socks, gleaming alligator shoes, shiny three-piece (his forefinger hooked in the vest), polka-dot tie with diamond stickpin (AA), sparkling and blinking like Christmas lights, blocked Dobb, cocked over one eye—he reached up a hand in salute, taking the hat edge onto his long-tipped fingers, then bringing the hat into the circle of his lap—initialed (AA) silk handkerchief, big sparkling cuff links—Hatch teased him, What’s those, handcuffs? screaming the words wet in his face, as he was hard of hearing; He listening to the sound of the railroad, Beulah said—and a big cloisonné horseshoe ring (he liked the races, horse and dog) that glittered and wavered. Always clean as a broke-dick dog, Beulah said, through the worn threads of her voice, plenty of jack. Come here, little nigger, And said, worrying the railroad watch attached to his vest from a heavy silver chain. Hatch came. And put the big watch in Hatch’s hand. Hatch examined it like some fossil. Engraved on the back, a double track between two crossed semaphores, stop signal. You know how niggas is. Niggas loaded everything into they steamer trunks. No engine, I don’t care how powerful, could move that train. We had to open up some of them trunks. See what inside. One nigga got his bathtub in there. One got his stove. Another got his horse in there. Another his house. Got good tips, And said, but some white folks cheaper than Jack Benny. Give you a quarter or a cigar and pect you to do a song and dance.
Divorced (separated?), Beulah moved to Decatur and found a job in the local dog-food factory. Purchased a two-story (wood and brick, green and white) house with a length of green lawn where Hatch and Jesus could wrestle, chase Jacky and Lil Judy, and enough yard for a grove of pear trees. Her second husband, Mr. George, a co-worker at the factory—I knew him before we decided to jump the broom—was as plain as And was colorful. The light of the body is the eye. Overalls and snuff. Smoking his pipe—snuff and a pipe?—under the spreading pear trees. (Hatch could not recall a single instance of Mr. George speaking, the tucked pipe clogging back the words.) Wearing a basin-shaped hat and a black mortician suit on his way to church each Sunday. When she had the strength, Uncle John and Lucifer would walk her—one of them could have carried her without missing a breath, but she insisted on Walking on my own two feet. That’s what God give them to me for. Last person who carried me was And. Over the threshold. Mr. George too old to carry anybody and I don’t plan to marry no more—to the front porch, slowly, every inch of skin shaking with the effort as if she would crumble. The two of them, Beulah and Mr. George, the unlit pipe tucked between his lips, sitting in the cushioned rocking chairs on the screened porch, not a single word from the man, nothing escaping past the plug of pipe. And when And came to town, the three of them sitting on the long, noisy rocker/glider, where summer voices floated around them and fireflies flickered and faded at night. That was how Mr. George died one evening as the sun turned copper, heart exploding inside his chest, Beulah hearing the creaking rocker stop, s
eeing the angles of the chair freeze in place and blood thread from his nose.
Sugar. Hypertension. Heart attacks. Two operations to cut out the cancer. But I’m still here. Death try to sneak up on me when I sleep. But I go when the good Lord call me.
A wedge of light fell outward from the door. Found glints in her hair.
You hear bout people falling off a mountain and survivin wit nothin but a scratch, then you hear bout people dyin from a bump on the head. You go when it time fo you to go.
Her voice was soft and secret, almost a whisper, as if she were talking to herself.
When St. Peter say Come home, better put on yo runnin shoes.
She had outlived her one brother and many sisters (she killed one herself, when she was a girl, dropped the baby and busted its skull), some—Sam, Koot, Big Judy—whom Hatch had seen, heard, and touched, found various ways to die—though she was the oldest child.
Beulah, you the firstborn?
No, the second. The first baby, a lil baby girl, drowned on Mamma’s milk.
All that remained, silent photographs, shadowy names, and inscrutable memories. Her family originated somewhere near Houston (’Sippi, not Texas), and she knew little more than that, knew nothing of her grandparents, so the family lineage began and ended at her maiden name, Griffith. (Some even spelled the family name differently. Griffis.)
Now they talkin bout men on the moon. Life motionless but alive, Beulah spoke between wheezes, cast talk in his teeth, a film of mist softening every word, the voice weak.
They open a new highway, let it roll wide the earth, shake trees from their roots. Birds leave the edges of the forest, abandon the highway, carry pieces of the moon between their claws. Their sharp wings cut through the clouds. They fly up to mountaintops and from the highest peaks take in the widest landscapes. Foresee the space age.
Rails Under My Back Page 53