Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  To Angela Townsend and Wendell Townsend,

  who shared their stories and everything else.

  To David Gides,

  who showed me how to live life in Technicolor.

  Most of all, to Rhianna Sade and Fadzai Iman,

  who are the brightest stars in the darkest night.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE | Audrey

  Thrown

  Bingo

  Saint Monkey

  Capezios

  Cinderella

  Griffin

  Jupiter

  Coal

  PART TWO | Caroline

  Rhombus

  Peanut

  Saved

  Lackland

  Detail

  PART THREE | Audrey

  Mr. Barbour

  Puffer

  Harlem

  Him

  PART FOUR | Caroline

  3:10 to Yuma

  Faith

  Party

  Angels’ Share

  PART FIVE | Audrey

  Beautiful

  Peace

  Snow

  Laundry

  Brubeck

  PART SIX | Audrey

  Ice

  Famous Ones

  Lightning

  Hatteras

  Key Lime

  Wrecking Ball

  PART SEVEN | Caroline

  Ditch

  Daddy

  PART EIGHT | Audrey

  Summer

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  Audrey

  THROWN

  I see grief every day here on Queen Street. I see it in the hunch of a man who has lost his woman and his job in Cincinnati and come back down to Kentucky after the winter, his head permanently bent by the pelt of hard snow in the absence of a hat. In the dark undereyes of the girl who dusts the ceilings at Huggins Dime Store, the girl who, seven months gone, climbed into the woods of Mt. Sterling to push out her stillborn baby girl, begotten of the frog-eyed, otherwise-married lawyer old enough to be her own father. In the slow gait of a church-hatted woman whose only soft young son has been away to the war and come home to someone else’s country with a stump where a leg should be, his military pension only half that of the White officers’ and therefore inadequate to buy all the liquor he needs on an empty Saturday night. I see it, but the adults all around me say grief is a thing unknown to children.

  Still, my granddaddy built me this porch swing the week after my daddy died, not because he thought I was grieving, but because he meant to keep me amused. “Keep Audrey occupied,” he told people. “Keep her around the house with her dress down and her bloomers up.” Since my daddy died, Grandpap has begun to see me as a dry leaf in freefall, a wasted petal about to be crunched under a man’s foot. He wants me to forget all the boys of Montgomery County and take studies in typing, to let go the idea of marrying a town sweetheart and become, instead, a woman of the city in a store-bought dress and nylons, with my own bedboard and bankbook. I’m supposed to fly and dream about all that, sitting here in this swing. He painted it white, whiter even than the side of this house, whose thin coat is peeling to expose the aged black wood underneath. He painted the wood slats of this swing so white that when you stare at them for a time, they seem blue. Swing high, and the porch ceiling creaks where he riveted the screws: the grown people who walk by warn me. “Hey gal, it ain’t a playground swing,” they say. For them, for their limitations, I stop pumping my legs, and the creaking stops. But when they’ve faded down the walk, I fly high again.

  Mother never sees me swinging. Mother never sees me. She works days at the county health clinic and nights, without even changing her white nurse’s shoes and stockings, she walks up to Seventh Street and gives Miss Ora Ray her bath and bedclothes. When a bad storm comes, or if Miss Ora Ray’s kin has come to visit, Mother is home in the evenings. Then, she listens to her stories on the radio, her stockinged feet massaging each other like a cricket’s, her mouth and eyes open and aimed at nothing. All her people are down in Tennessee, three hours by the L&N, but she hasn’t seen them since my daddy’s funeral. She never sees me swinging. She never sees me. She tells my granddaddy that since I talk to her like grown-ass Colored, I can press and curl my own damn hair.

  “You keep treating her like she’s a baby wolf,” Grandpap says, on winter nights when I’m kicking around the bed for the hot water bottle and he thinks his voice is covered by the crackling in the coal stove. “See if she don’t bite you when she grows up.”

  From my swing I’m witness to crooked arm Fridays like this one, when husbands, uncles, sons, and boyfriends pour home from distilleries, tobacco farms, pool halls, or wherever they’ve gone to stuff their pockets so they can walk down Queen Street with arms bent around bags of groceries, toys, schoolclothes, or coal. Grandpap stopped delivering for Riley’s Grocery an age ago; Fridays, he’s like an old dog without a bone. But No. 211, the house directly across the street, still gets its tickful, at six o’clock sharp, when Sonnyboy walks through the door with a bushel of oranges for the family, or linen skirts for two girls, or paper dolls for Imagene and a Five Keys record for Pookie. In the first months after Mother got her telegram from the Army, when the sun fell earlier each evening and the wind blew colder each night, when we could still wake up in moonglow and hear Grandpap crying over the bathroom sink, I’d sit in this swing and pretend that Sonnyboy was my daddy. Returned alive from the war after all, and getting paid on a Friday like any other well-behaved Negro. No. 211, in my daydreams, was a detour—a charity—and Sonnyboy’d soon enough be through my door bringing saltwater taffy.

  Having delivered, having set off the chain explosion of laughter that bursts out the front window and drifts across the street, Sonny­boy always comes back out to the porch, as if in retreat from his girls’ delight. He pulls the maroon shirttail of his uniform over his grease-shined belt and smokes his head into a blue cloud, and I look south for cars and pretend not to watch him. Sonnyboy’s the daddy who rescued swollen sidewalk chalk from pails full of rain while my own daddy was inside sketching a car motor, the daddy with such a firm, sure way of moving and speaking that I look down to his feet and blush whenever he asks me and Pookie what we learned that day in school. He upsie-daisies Imagene, sending the frills of her red petticoat floating against a blue sky, and I’m the one who shimmies with giggles. He unbuttons his shirt and chops wood in the backyard, and it’s a neighborhood event.

  He must’ve come a little unstacked when Pookie was born—must have—because she’s center-of-the-bone ugly. A bit of proof-requiring math, because she’s not the sum of two ugly parents or even the average of two mismatched ones—Sonnyboy’s wife, Mauris, is pretty enough to hurt old men’s hearts. Pookie’s younger sister Imagene has dark, smooth skin and eyes as wide as Peace dollars. But Pookie’s carrot red hair, freckles, and buckteeth skipped a generation, right from the White man who raped Miss Myrtle straight down to Pookie. “Mauris shouldn’t have been out feeding that hound while she was expecting,” folks said after Pookie was born, talking about her dog, Sammy. “She marked that baby.” And Pookie’s head does bob when she runs, and her tongue does hang a little beyond her buckteeth, and owing to her bad posture she has a chest that is not blooming outward but growing more concave, so that even now, as she runs across the street to see me, I think of Sammy despite myself.

  “Audrey!” she yells when she gets to my side of the street. “It’s Friday, girl. What we going to do?”

  “What you think? Nothing.”

  Pookie runs up Grandpap’s three steps and jumps onto the swing with me, cups a ring of her thick, shiny hair in her hand. Her hair naturally curls at the ends like Ava Gardner’s, and Mauris never has to run the pressing comb through it or
even hair grease, because the White man’s texture, too, telegraphed down through the generations. Because Pookie’s some uncertain, she hides her vanity from the adults in our town, but any kid in our school who’s watched her for even two minutes knows she thinks her hair’s going to get her to Hollywood. “In California,” she’ll say, tossing one thick braid and then the other behind her back. She’ll raise her chin to give her hair a few more inches down her back and explain, “up over the hills of Los Angeles.” Once, when we were all snapping beans in the kitchen, her grandmama got mad and told her to stop throwing all that hair. “You’re lucky, it’ll get you far as a big farm out in the next county,” Miss Myrtle told her. Other girls with good hair get it ripped out by the roots at school—only because Pookie is so ugly does no one begrudge her her hair.

  “Maybe we can dress us up and go down to the Tin Cup,” she says now.

  “What would we look like trying to set down in the Tin Cup? A couple of fourteen-year-olds.”

  “We don’t look fourteen,” she says, removing my thick glasses and folding them gently to put in her pocket. Without them, I can barely see her. “We can draw you in some eyebrows,” she says, tracing the bare ridge above my eye socket, “and nobody’ll know you got too close to the woodstove.”

  I slap her finger away, but she isn’t looking at me. She’s smiling ahead, dreaming, because tall, fine Junebug is coming down the road toward us whistling “Maybelline.” Junebug has a jawline like a cornice, eyes that turn up at their corners, and what Pookie calls a meaty butt, and every time I see him walking down the street, I wish he were here in this swing with me.

  “Junebutt, Junebutt, fly on over this-away,” Pookie whispers, parting her hair down the middle, twisting the right half of it into a fingercurl. It’s her habit, to style her hair when she’s lost in thinking. She fingercurls the left half, then shakes her head slightly so the hair falls softly out of its curls and down her chest. She thinks she’s gotten somewhere charming, but the halfway points of her hairstyles are always more glamorous than the endpoints. An actress on Broadway would’ve kept the curls, I want to tell her: it’s such bad fortune that, with all her aspirations, she doesn’t seem to understand the difference between chorus girl and country mope. “Junebutt Jones,” she whispers, and drapes a hand luxuriously over her side of the swing.

  Junebug ignores us—why shouldn’t he? He’s years older and finished with high school and working down at the ice plant with Sonnyboy and probably going to the Tin Cup at night or even riding to Louisville to see the bands that come through the Lincoln Theater, while Pookie and I perch here on this swing like a couple of crows. As he walks closer, I take Pookie’s right hand in my left and we both pump our legs, push our backs into the lift of the swing. The eyehooks look ready to pop out of the wood, and the ceiling creaks louder than it ever has, but Junebug is passing right in front of the house and we’re giggling so loud to get his attention that we don’t even hear the roof groan. Finally, one of the eyehooks breaks free and we’re both thrown backwards into the next yard, the air sailing out of our lungs as gravity finds us. Our long skirts and sweaters are covered in Dr. French’s freshly cut grass, and as the swing scrapes the porch and comes to land on its one end, we lie there and laugh, watching each other’s bodies framed beneath blue sky and clouds, neither of us willing to get up and brush ourselves off in front of Junebug.

  Anyone could see it’s a miracle our heads cleared the concrete edge, but Junebug doesn’t even stop to see if we’re alive.

  BINGO

  Clouds move over spring like a patchwork quilt, throwing us far enough back to winter that the fresh lemonade in the icebox will lose its taste before Mother remembers it. Look up to the sky and ask Pookie what’s there, and she’ll say the clouds look like nothing. The ornery grain of a burlap sack, she’ll say. Failed yarnwork. Miss Myrtle hustles her pots full of tomato sprouts back to her kitchen window to save them from frost, and Percy Greer packs himself and his gin from his porch back into his sitting room to keep his feet warm. Pauline Burke, this Strawberry Winter, skips down the street scratching her dry, dry scalp.

  Rays of sun stream through a far corner of sky and Ralph Cundiff balances on the old splintered horse in front of the Colored store. Tyrone Boyd sits under Fifth Street’s oldest oak with his legs straight ahead of him, chewing good nickel gum, blowing a bubble big as a frog’s head. Working a twig in the back end of a poor stinkbug, but even that must not be enough to soothe his nature, because he gets up, takes a railroad tie from the Flahertys’ working pile, and throws it at Ralph’s back. For a dodge, Ralph jumps up in the air like a Russian acrobat, but then he comes down on the horse, faltering, and though he leans on his ankle every which way and waves his arms in circles, though none of us can see it coming because he tries so hard in those three seconds to get it not to, he ends up facedown on the ground. Screaming, just as the clouds recover the sun and we all of us, by some instinct, turn and point to where he has fallen. He screams a second time and Tyrone, the only one of us kids not pointing, creeps away, across the sandy lot and toward the alley behind Mr. Barnett’s store. He stops mid-escape to wipe sweat from the bridge of his nose, and we can tell by the way he drops his shoulders just before he runs that he’d meant nothing as malicious as what’s happened.

  Mr. Barnett comes out of his store with his gray apron strings untied and swinging angry counterpoint against his hips. “What happened here?” he yells at us. Cold wind billows the front of his apron but we stand there: dumb, dropping our pointing fingers, unsure. “What happened?” he yells again, this time down to the ground, at Ralph, who curls into a ball and screams a second time, his palm flat against the broken plates of his ruined knee. It takes his starting to cry, pitiful as any baby, before we put our arms down.

  “The big dummy,” Pookie says to me. “Let’s go.”

  It’s 60 degrees, wrong for the end of March and yet when we get to the White people’s downtown, where mud meets asphalt and streets become official, the drug store door is open, shooing out the smell of freshly boiled candy and the voice of a radio. Hank Ballard’s singing out, “Work with Me, Annie,” and we can hear him all the way up High Street, the only Negro voice we’ll ever hear coming from Rickles Pharmacy. As we pass, the notes come even to our ears, and at the door, the harmonics reach pitch, but as we walk further on, past the lawyers’ offices and the bank and the bakery that’s been dead since its roof collapsed in a fire last Christmas, the notes fall flat again. We’re just easing down High Street Hill, breathing the scent of candy into the back of our brains, when we run into Miss Wofford.

  “Land sakes,” she says when she sees me and Pookie, and she puts her box down on the grass fronting the street. Out of her mauve shirt come plump, tanned arms, the freckles dark and so close together as to look like one big cake of freckles, but she lightens at her extremities, and her hands are small, tiny really, with soft white fingers. A wedding band still cuts into her ring finger, because she believed Mr. Thornton last year when he said he’d stop at three wives. Now, everyone in town knows: he sees nothing wrong with courting a fourth.

  She pokes Pookie in the chest, just under the V of her cardigan, in the place where any animal is most vulnerable. “We kin,” she tells her, and they are, even though Miss Wofford’s White, because she’s sister to the man who raped Miss Myrtle. “Kinfolk got to help each other,” she says. She tilts her head back, sticks her bottom lip out for a funnel, and blows again at her stray hair. “This here box is full of sandwiches I’m carrying down to St. Patrick’s for bingo night. I set things up in the afternoon, but then Father Fenton held Business Council downstairs and left the place untidy. Follow me down and help clean, I’ll give you gals a dollar. A dollar to share.”

  The way she says it, it’s not an offer so much as an order, and I would point this out to Pookie, but she’s nodding, gone with this already, thinking thirty steps ahead of me and my dignity to what fifty cents might do for her in Hollywood. Never mi
nd that Thurgood Marshall has gone hoarse this winter telling the Supreme Court that Colored children, too, need to look at themselves in clean school mirrors, or that Mauris and Miss Myrtle both would beat Pookie perfectly senseless if they knew she was going downtown to sweep Miss Wofford’s church hall. Pookie’s following this woman downtown like a baby duckling, and because she’s the shiniest pearl I know, because I’m her best friend and not able to think too far apart from her, I’m following too.

  In the church basement are fifteen card tables, two of them full of what the Business Committee has left: in one plate, a cigarette extinguished in a mound of uneaten mashed potatoes; on another, a dollop of gravy dried to gel, surrounded by crumbs of still-pink beef; on another, tomato sauce smeared in spirals where someone has sopped it up with bread. Pookie stacks the plates and takes them over to the kitchen and then she’s back, wiping down tables, edging sandwich crumbs into the palm of her hand with a wet rag. I’m sitting, watching, in a corner chair whose stuffing is coming out in patches. There’s another girl, Sarah, a tall redhead with a mess of freckles on both cheeks—she’s taking the sandwiches out of Miss Wofford’s box and setting them on green saucers. At the same time, she’s smoking, stopping to exhale between plates, and when she drops a bit of ash on one of the sandwiches, she carefully puts her thumb and third finger together and flicks the ash onto the floor. Miss Wofford didn’t see fit to introduce us, but we heard her call the girl Sarah when she yelled at her for denting the bread with her fingers. Sarah’s thin in most places but heading to plump in her arms, and if we didn’t know for a fact that Miss Wofford was a virgin for most of her forty-some years, we’d have mistaken Sarah for her daughter.

  “Y’all from around here?” Sarah asks.

  “Born and raised,” says Pookie. With the rag, she tries to erase a purple stain on a table, first making a tent of her fingers to apply pressure, and then giving it some wholesale elbow grease, leaning into her work, wiping and wiping until she decides the stain is part of the table and moves on.